


No Little Plans

by Cecil



Category: Harry Potter - Fandom
Genre: (i.e. Pre-Teens with Magic), Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, And Neither Does Harry, Draco Doesn't Know Any Better, Free Range Impulse Deficits, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Magical Extinction, Pre-Slash, Sort Of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-27
Updated: 2018-10-22
Packaged: 2019-04-13 12:39:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 23,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14112546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cecil/pseuds/Cecil
Summary: On the evening of October 31st, 1981, the Dark Lord Voldemort arrived in Godric’s Hollow. With the morale of his loyal followers at an all time high following several devastating victories, the prevailing sense on both sides of the war was that the end was nigh.Voldemort arrived in Godric’s Hollow that Halloween with every intention of killing the son of Lily and James Potter, thereby safeguarding his dominance of Wizarding Britain.This is where history gets muddled.Ten years later, Harry Potter’s 11th birthday comes and goes without fanfare. His cousin, Dudley, begins school at Smeltings Academy while Harry is relegated to the neighborhood secondary school, where they stick your head in the toilets on the first day.Then he meets his fairy godmother.





	1. Hold your breath (count to three)

**Author's Note:**

> I know exactly where this is going, but how we'll get there, or when is a bit less clear.
> 
> RE: the warnings about referenced and implied abuse--it's not overt, but it's definitely recognizable for the people who may have the strongest feelings about it, so.
> 
>  
> 
> \---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ten years interred in the Dursleys’ backyard, Harry knows: he is not like other boys.

Of course, he's wrong.

.x.

Good news, bad news: Dudley isn’t going to Stonewall High with Harry.

All of his friends from the neighborhood are.

“Have a good lunch, Potty!” they whoop and yell with voices that crack on the door frame of the broom closet. The other students had stepped around Piers and the other boys carrying Harry from the classroom with uncanny precision that belied how resolutely they were pretending not to notice.

Piers’s cackling and the rest of the crowd noises in the corridor fade away quickly after they’ve pushed him inside and shut the door.

At least they’d waited until the second week of school. At least it’s just a broom closet, and not a toilet.

More good news, bad news: poor diet and years yet to snag whatever puberty lies in wait for him, it's only a little, but Harry _has_ gotten bigger since primary school. The broom closets haven't.

Well, why should anything change?

Harry settles in for the lunch period. His elbows scrape the corners of the shelves on the wall and there’s a wet mop head between his feet and the floor. The bottles of cleaner are all capped, at least, so the stinging smell of chemicals could be worse. He should be fine as long as he gets let out in the next few hours, when it’s time to go home.

It's silent beyond the door. Then suddenly it's not.

.x.

“So you're the famous Harry Potter.”

There's silence again, like maybe Harry's only imaging the voice. But then there's more sound, the slide of the doorknob Harry thought was locked being pulled out of the door frame. Then comes the daylight, and in its contours his boy saviour.

The boy helps him out of the broom closet. Harry, once he's out, sets about trying to make the lump of grey fabric Aunt Petunia had dyed in the summer into something that more passingly resembles clothing. But that had been a long shot before Harry had worn it and washed it and worn it and been stuffed in with the bleach and half-filled mop bucket by hands the size of his own head.

Harry shoves his too large shirt tails into his too large pants and pulls his sleeves up from his knuckles. With everything in place, he thinks, he looks a bit like an elephant who's shrunk away to nothing and only left his skin behind. The pants legs puddle over his shoes in a grey gloop. Harry bends down to roll back the cuffs. The whole time, he feels the other boy's eyes maddeningly, insistently on the top of his head.

Not that he's not grateful and everything. But even the teachers on the first day of school had paid less attention checking the attendance register each hour, connecting name and face for the inevitable future reprimands.

“You are. You're Harry Potter.”

Harry feels his face heat up. He can hear it, the gloat in the other boy's voice, the taunt of someone else's victory. The other boy is probably smiling.

“Well?”

Things really don't change. Foolish of him to think this was anything but opportunity.

Harry looks up. The other boy is smiling brightly. Harry swallows, says, “That’s me.”

The way the other boy's smile widens, the squint at the corner of his eyes, Harry recognizes it from hundreds of painful or humiliating times before. Dudley here in spirit bigger than his body.

The other boy says, “This is _brilliant_.” His voice pitches up in his excitement, and he moves forward.

Harry braces himself. Teeth clenched, eyes shut, he thinks he might have flinched, which hurts, but not as much as a fist to the stomach.

.x.

The blow doesn't come.

The blow keeps not coming.

Harry opens his eyes.

The boy is still smiling. He says, “This is amazing, meeting you like this.” He's holding out his hand for a handshake.

Harry stares. “What? I mean—what?”

“This school's a nightmare,” the boy replies cheerfully. “The only reason I’m here is because Father said you’d be here, too. People are always saying they know where you are, though,” the boy grumbles. This is clearly a sore subject. “I never imagined it was true.”

“Me?” The floor, the corridor, the school, nothing so much as wavers as the world slides down and off the tilt of its axis.

“Well, it sure wasn't for Borsely.” The other boy actually looks amused.

Harry, though, is still confused. “Borsely?” Burly fourth former with choppy blond hair and muscles bulging his uniform seams. He looked like a walking stone in the corridor in between classes. “What about him?” Harry asks.

The other boy gives him a vaguely mocking look and chides, “Don't tell me you haven't noticed the way he looks at you.”

Actually, “No, I have.”

Borsely wasn’t the sharpest tool in the chest, and anyway, six years of going to school with Dudley had immunized Harry against taunts and condescension as well as anyone could hope for. Harry didn’t think Borsely would physically hurt him. Wouldn’t grab him in an empty corridor when all the doors were closed. Wouldn’t chase him down the alleyway behind the kitchen. Borsely, as far as the student gossip mill was concerned, had never so much as looked at a fly the wrong way.

So whatever unease Harry felt when his eyes accidentally met Borsely's, or their existences crossed paths, it was something completely alien. Similar, but entirely apart from being wary of Dudley’s fists. Harry didn’t know what it was about Borsely that put him on guard.

Harry asks, “What do you know about it?”

The boy's hand and smile finally drop. “He's curious. He's one of us.”

Harry draws his next breath carefully. “What do you mean, one of us? Who are we?”

“Harry,” the boy says, beginning to get a little exasperated at Harry’s only ever documented skill, which is massively missing the obvious. “He's a _wizard_. Like you. Like me.”

.x.

There's no such thing as wizards. Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia have said this explicitly. Magic can’t be real. Because magic would be very important, like--like the the names of all the wars Britain has won, or how buildings in London were put together. People wrote books about important things, and Uncle Vernon bought them and put them in Dudley’s spare room, where Dudley did not read them. Not one of the books in Dudley’s spare room (which Harry had snuck in and read) had ever been about wizards or magic.

Except. Sometimes when a little boy or a little girl was very good and he or she was very, very sad, sometimes, there were mother-and-fathers-who-aren't, who were both fairies and gods. And they’d do small favours for lonely children with no parents. Small, good things.

Like make chores that would otherwise take hours somehow finish themselves in just minutes.

And make embarrassing haircuts that would draw all the wrong kinds of attention decent and unextraordinary.

And set large, deadly snakes in glass cases free so they can scare off bullies (but Harry tries not to think about that too much because that wasn't a good thing, and maybe it hadn’t even had anything to do with Harry at all, but it had still ended with Dudley standing on his hand so hard and so long that it aches even now to hold a broom at home, or write notes in class).

.x.

Harry wants to say something to the boy’s declaration.

_—a wizard, he’s not a—_

His tongue feels too big in his mouth. He’s talking before he’s decided what to say. “A _wizard?_ ”

“Yes,” the boy says in exasperation. His eyes narrow. “You had to have known.”

Harry agrees. He would’ve known. That’s how he knows the boy is lying.

“Listen,” the boy says when Harry remains silent, “The lunch hour's almost over. I don't have time to eat all my lunch. Do you want to split it?”

Harry blinks, swallows. It’s a concept wholly incompatible with his past experiences, voluntary splitting of possessions. Hesitantly, he nods his head. “Yeah. OK, yeah. I mean—thanks.”

The boy kneels down and flips open his leather satchel. Real leather, Harry can smell it when he takes the apple the boy offers, wraps his fingers around the red peel. Harry looks at the boy still kneeling over his bag. The light through the window on the other side of the corridor spreads in wide bands across the floor, under his feet and the boy’s feet and up the off-white cinder block wall. Harry sits down on the floor across from the kneeling boy. “Thanks. Um… I don’t—I don’t know your name.”

The boy smiles. “I’m Draco. Malfoy.”

It’s the weirdest name Harry’s ever heard on the weirdest day he’s ever had.

.x.

In primary school, Dudley and Harry walked three streets over from Magnolia Crescent with all the other neighborhood children each morning and back again each afternoon. Aunt Petunia had walked with them at first, clutching at Dudley's tiny, meaty hands, petting his hair while Dudley squirmed and kicked and bared his teeth. Harry counted five big steps behind the tips of his trainers and the backs of Aunt Petunia's heels, and pulled the thin straps of his knapsack tight until they dug into his shoulders a little less.

Then Dudley finally won the fight to walk to school alone. He'd wait at the edge of the playground for Harry to finish cleaning the morning dishes and emerge into the tiny radius of the journey not visible to either the house or the school so he and he friends could tear Harry's knapsack away and dump out all his school things and stomp on his sandwich until it bled its filling up against the tight cellophane wrapping.

This year, Harry rides the bus. The walk from the bus stop to home takes eleven minutes and forty-seven seconds. The bus is neither quiet nor calm in the afternoon rush, with schoolkids and moms with toddlers and the earliest of the office workers all retreating from the city for the day. But it’s usually the most relaxing part of his day.

.x.

Draco rides the same bus.

Harry doesn’t notice at first because Draco doesn’t, at first. But the very next afternoon after Draco rescues Harry from the broom closet and feeds him half his lunch, he’s there, sitting right in the first row of seats on the way home. Harry ignores him. He walks all the way to back. He looks deliberately out of the window for the entire ride.

Draco rides the bus both ways on the following day, and Harry ignores him again. The third day, Draco gets off the bus first and waits on the pavement, sketch perfect in his charcoal grey uniform while the other kids in the neighborhood swarm around him like a river around a rock. He doesn’t move until Harry stumbles onto the sidewalk after his books, last off as usual.

Harry adjusts the set of his glasses, ignoring Draco's blatant stare. It’s not that basic motor skills are difficult, even encumbered by an armful of library books, but he's a growing boy and sometimes it's hard to keep pace with his body. And a foot in his path or an elbow in his stomach never helps.

Harry sets off down the street. Draco falls into step beside him. Harry shoots the other boy a look, but Draco just keeps looking back until Harry drops his gaze.

“You should come over sometime,” Draco says as they walk out of the alley between Wisteria and Magnolia Crescent.

“I don't—think—”

“Only it seems like you don’t believe me,” Draco continues. “About being a wizard. It’s all right if you don’t. It’s not the kind of thing you should go spreading around, anyway.”

Harry wishes he’d _stop talking_ because they’ve turned onto Privet Drive, and Dudley’s right there in the yard, on his hand and knees in a pair of the latest, fashionable denim. Vernon just bought the pants at the end of summer break, and they’re already brown in the knees. Dudley’s probably barbecuing insects with his state of-the-art magnifying glass again.

“You don’t understa--” Harry says, and at the same time, Draco’s saying “--least you could do--”

Draco steps right into his pathway, turns around, and stops. Harry walks into his chest. The books in Harry’s arms flip out of his arms, across the pavement, and into the grass. One falls open right at their feet. Right to storybook calligraphy letters and accompanying crayola bright pictures. Dudley, at least, doesn’t notice and doesn’t look up from his tiny ant massacre.

“So,” Draco says. He isn’t laughing at him, like Harry had expected him to. Draco bends down and picks up the book. Offers it back to Harry, still open to periwinkle robes and moon-silver hair lit green under the collision of yellow and blue streaks in the skin. _Merlin._ “You like sweets, right?”

.x.

Small favors, Draco isn’t in any of Harry’s classes. They ride the same bus, but live in opposite directions. They share a lunch period, but Draco usually spends those mocking teachers, insulting classmates, and haranguing the town in general, which is annoying and reminds Harry entirely too much of Dudley for Harry to really enjoy, but is not, as Harry is acutely aware, the worst thing he could talk about.

(The worst thing he could talk about would be magic, and how it’s real, how Harry could change his entire life if he just--)

Anyway, Draco’s mother always packs sweets. The really good kind, the kind Dudley only gets on his birthday and holidays, and only if he remembers to whine. Harry likes the cream cheese tarts the best, Draco tells him _that’s not the point_ , but he brings them a lot.

They eat in the library. This is a direct violation of school rules, and also Draco is loud. But Harry had already taken to spending all of his time not in class in the library, so the librarian has grown fond of him. Draco rolls his eyes and says that’s just typical, Harry tells him to shut up, but not that it’s not all that typical at that, not for him. Since the librarian hadn’t kick them out even after these arguments, Draco complains probably less than he’d like.

Three weeks pass like this. They’re the best three weeks of Harry’s life.

  
.x.

Draco, though, isn’t satisfied with quiet lunches and rides on the bus. He wants the impossible. He still wants Harry to come home with him.

“You don’t understand,” Harry says, raising his voice just enough to be heard over the din of everyone else on the bus, “the Dursleys don’t like me. They’ll say no.”

Draco gets one of his displeased looks. He has many, and employs them regularly at school. In this one, his eyebrows and nose scrunch, so that means he’s not just upset by the circumstances, but also slightly baffled. “But that’s stupid,” he protests. “If they don’t like you, they should want you out of the house.”

Harry focuses on keeping his voice calm as he says, “Not if I’m enjoying it, though, you see?”

“No,” Draco huffs and crosses his arms. Then he ponders it a bit, and says, “Well, yes, actually, that makes sense.”

“Gee, thanks,” Harry says dryly. He’s been working on lifting just one eyebrow, for when Draco says or does something poncy that makes Harry question their friendship. He’s been getting a lot of practice over the last few weeks, but he hasn’t quite figured it out, yet.

Draco shoves Harry sideways. They’ve just reached the stop for school, so Harry goes with it, slides onto his feet and stands in the aisle as the driver rolls to a halt. They get off the bus.

Draco says, “I’ll figure it out.”

“Uh-huh,” Harry says doubtfully, and goes to his first class.

.x.

At lunch time, Harry gets to the library first. Harry usually gets to the library first, and then Draco arrives a few minutes later, nose turned up as if he’s being forced in against his will. But today, Harry sits alone at a small table deep in the fiction section for half the period and has already finished the bland school dinner before Draco finally storms in.

Draco throws his satchel down on the table right beside Harry’s elbow with a startling violence. The bag’s metal clasps strike the wooden tabletop with a sound that makes Harry draw back into his chair reflexively.

After a short pause where Harry concludes that all his fingers are still attached and unsquashed by metal edges, he snaps, “Watch it.”

The librarian, far on the other side of the room reshelving reference books, doesn’t notice.

For a brief moment, there’s a shadow of repentance about Draco’s face, but he doesn’t actually apologize. All he says is, “I’ve been working on our little conundrum.”

“Any luck?” Harry asks, trying not to sound either too hopeful or too forgiving.

Draco settles into the seat across from him with a heavy thump. “I may have a lead,” he begins with gravity, but then his shoulder slump, and he ends up grumbling, “but these things take time.”

Harry glares at him.

Draco gives Harry most of the sweets his mom packed. Today, it’s a colorful collection of mini macarons, layered together in a little gold foil tray. Harry picks out the blue and green ones with jam filling and slides the rest the back across to Draco, who sulkily devours them all. Draco also has an artisanal sandwich, with baby greens and fancy mustard that still just looks like mustard even though Harry knows it probably came in a little jar that cost more than 10 quid, and a packet of crisps which he leaves in their vaguely crumpled glory on the table, untouched.

Harry eats them both, and takes solace in the knowledge that in another half hour, Draco’s going to be cranky for not eating more, and he’s not going to have anyone to blame but himself.

.x.

“You’re number 4, right?” Draco asks as the bus slows on Magnolia Road at the end of the week. He doesn’t wait for an answer. Just hops off the bus and races toward his home without a backward glance.

Harry has a sinking feeling. The feeling is justified, a few hours later, while he’s in the kitchen prepping dinner. The doorbell rings while Harry is scrubbing lumpy potatoes over the sink. This is unusual, not because the Dursleys never have evening guests, but because Harry has not been warned to be quiet and invisible as a dust mite. There are voices in the hall, then Aunt Petunia in the kitchen.

She is livid, and underneath that, terrified. “You,” she exhales sharply, extending one sharp nail in Harry’s direction.

Harry does not say anything. To his recollection, he hasn’t done anything that warrants berating, and he doesn’t want to say something that might suggest he does.

The water from the faucet continues to rush loudly into the sink.

“Outside,” Aunt Petunia gasps. She is speaking entire sentences in single words, which is a terrible sign. “Immediately.”

Harry drops the potato he’s holding in the sink, turns off the water, and goes.

.x.

Draco’s big plan is his parents ambushing the Dursleys in their own home.

“Oh, hello, Harry,” Draco’s mom says when Harry comes down the hall. Aunt Petunia is right on his heels. She barely misses pulling his socks off with every step.

Harry comes to a halt just behind Uncle Vernon and Dudley, who, side-by-side, take up all the width of the foyer. Dudley’s mouth is open. Uncle Vernon’s mouth is also open behind his moustache, a gaping, dark hole of confusion. At Draco’s mom’s greeting, he reaches blindly backwards and sweeps Harry toward the stairs, out of sight.

Harry goes with the push willingly. He squeezes between the banister’s edge and Uncle Vernon’s back, and climbs up the first few steps so that he can see the front stoop over the top of Dudley’s head.

Draco is standing on the front stoop. Draco is standing on the front stoop with a man who has long hair exactly the same sharp white blond as his own and a woman whose upright posture Draco has clearly been learning in imitation.

“We’re neighbors,” Draco’s dad says, “may we come in?”

His question is misleading. It implies there is a choice. In reality, no one in the Dursley house is remotely equipped to prevent Draco’s dad, Draco’s mom, and a blatantly smug Draco from gaining entrance.

.x.

Somehow, everyone ends up the sitting room.

No one is sitting.

Draco and his parents stand clustered in the arch back out into the foyer, while Uncle Vernon stands in front of the unlit fireplace with his hands on his hips. Aunt Petunia and Dudley stand several steps behind Uncle Vernon and to one side. Harry stands much further away on the other. Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia, and Dudley are, coincidentally, poised more or less in reflection of the large family portrait on the mantle. Only Aunt Petunia’s photograph fake-smile grimace is more blatantly just a grimace here in person.

“Well,” Uncle Vernon says, and nothing else. No one has interrupted him, he just hasn’t decided what to say next. His jaws slide his teeth back and forth over each other in indecision.

Draco’s family has not been tossed out despite their oddness. And they are very odd. For one thing, Draco is wearing polished dress shoes without a word of complaint just an hour before dinner, whereas Dudley chucks his only pair of school shoes off into a corner for his mother to find every afternoon. Draco’s dad is wearing a nice suit, crisp, like he’d put it on just for this visit. His mom is wearing pearls and long, black gloves that go all the way up to her elbows.

Clearly Draco’s family is a very different kind of family than the Dursleys. Everyone can see this.

And Harry sees the moment Uncle Vernon’s indecision lurches precipitously into ingratiation.

Aunt Petunia sees something else entirely in Draco’s family. Something she doesn’t like. She is trying with little subtlety to hide Dudley’s bulky girth behind her own. Dudley’s only concern seems to be for the television. While Harry can feel the hair on the back of his arms starting to stand on end, Dudley whines at his mother about missing his favorite show. All of Dudley’s shows are his favorite show, though. And for once, Aunt Petunia is unmoved.

.x.

Uncle Vernon’s confusion transforms into a friendly grin.“So. You must be new to the neighborhood!” He speaks across the room at Draco’s parents in increasingly loud tones even as he takes several bold steps closer. “Making the rounds, getting to know the neighbors?”

“Of a manner,” Draco’s dad replies. He says, “We live on Magnolia Road,” and he means _our house is much larger and nicer than yours._

Vindicated, Uncle Vernon’s grin grows bigger and more welcoming. “Well, we’re glad to have you! Great place to live. And you have a lovely son!”

Harry pushes down a sudden laugh and looks away from Draco, but not quickly enough to miss the way Draco cuts his eyes in his direction.

“He looks about the age of our Dudley, here,” Uncle Vernon boasts, now bringing his large hand around to Dudley’s equally large shoulder. Uncle Vernon wrenches Dudley out of Aunt Petunia’s desperate clutch and sweeps him up against his side, which brings him about four steps closer to Draco’s parents.

Or he tries to, anyway. Uncle Vernon and Dudley are both of a stature that makes other bodies bounce away much like small objects thrown at a large ball, so what really happens is Dudley just squeaks in protest as his father’s fingers squeeze his arm.

Aunt Petunia makes an aborted, sharp cry of alarm.

“He’s just started at Smeltings Academy this year,” Uncle Vernon forges on, glancing around the room. No matter where he looks, none of the pictures on the walls display Dudley in the distinctive orange knickerbockers.

“Has he?” Draco’s dad replies. “Our son goes to Stonewall. With Harry.”

“I went to Smeltings myself,” Uncle Vernon continues, overriding this declaration as if it hadn’t been made at all.

Draco’s dad gives Uncle Vernon a very obvious once-over, and then says in deliberate sort of tone, “I don’t believe this --school you speak of would provide the kind of educational environment we seek.”

Harry has to stifle another sudden, mad giggle. This is _bananas_. Draco’s dad has hair that falls over his shoulders when he tilts his head. Draco’s dad has a cane, like the rich adult version of Dudley’s walking stick. He looks exactly like a storybook drawing of one of Merlin’s apprentices, if the storybook drawings lost their pointy hats. Draco’s dad is a wizard. And his mom is a witch. They obviously couldn’t give less of a hoot about Smeltings Academy, which was fair, because Harry felt like any place that would produce Uncle Vernon and willingly take Dudley probably couldn’t give less of a hoot about magic, either.

Of course, Uncle Vernon doesn’t know that. “It’s a damn fine institution,” he insists to Draco’s dad. “Only the best. But you must have moved in too recently to really have any time to pick a private school.”

Horrifyingly, Uncle Vernon gives Draco’s dad the same conspiratorial smile/wink combination he usually employs over the table at dinner parties when he’s trying to convey both his own fortune and his willingness to share an increment of its bounty. “Your boy’s what, just turned 11? They take new applicants at 13. We could put in a good word for you.”

Draco’s mom and dad receive this offer with great apathy. Draco, hemmed in much more neatly by his own parents than Dudley, drives home their indifference by catching Harry’s eyes and making his own go wide in wordless appallment.

.x.

Draco’s mother cuts straight to the chase. She says, “We’d like to have Harry over. ”

Uncle Vernon’s posturing finally cracks wide open. “What do you want with _him?_ ”

“It’s only logical. Our son and Harry are in the same class,” Draco’s mom lies, but it’s not like the Dursleys would know. They wouldn’t be able to name Harry homeroom teacher if someone offered them a million quid. “They can support each other’s learning.”

The Dursleys have made it exceedingly clear to Harry that there are few things they are less interested in supporting than Harry’s learning, and now Aunt Petunia makes it clear to Draco’s mom when she throws back her shoulders and says, “I won’t allow it.”

Draco’s mom turns all of her focus on Aunt Petunia. “I’m sure you’ll find they hardly need _allowing_ to learn. They’ll do it one or another,” she says to Aunt Petunia in a calm voice. “I’m only proposing that they start learning together. Such an arrangement would be of benefit to them both.”

Aunt Petunia falters for no reason at all, as far as Harry can tell, before clenching her fists and lifting her chin. “He’s my nephew. If I say he’s not going, he’s not going.”

No one says anything for a moment. Not Uncle Vernon, who’s finally looked away from Draco’s parents to stare, bewildered, at Aunt Petunia, not Dudley, who’s settled into a petulant scowl, and not Draco’s parents, who do not seem like they are planning to react to Aunt Petunia’s outburst at all.

Finally, though, Draco’s mom says, “You must be...Lily’s sister, then. Is that right?” Her words are arranged so they sound like a question. But just like Draco’s dad, she is not actually waiting on an answer. “We went to school together, you know.”

Harry did not know. He doesn’t know why that statement makes Aunt Petunia’s and Uncle Vernon’s faces go immediately, starkly pale.

“She was a few years behind me,” Draco’s mom continues. “A very sweet girl.”

Uncle Vernon has taken several steps back, toward Aunt Petunia, and he’s dragged Dudley along with him.

That means now Harry has a clear path directly to Draco’s parents. _Great._ He has several questions he would like answered. Questions like, did Draco’s mom really go to school with Harry’s mom? Did she go to school with Harry’s dad, too? What were the chances of Draco’s parents going to the exact same school as Harry’s parents, and Harry and Draco just happening, all these years later, to also go to the same school? How did that just happen?

Then Harry remembers that it did not, in fact, just happen. Draco going to the same school as Harry was entirely by design.

Draco’s parents want Draco to be friends with Harry. Or they want Harry to be friends with Draco. Either way, and whatever the reason, Harry has a feeling they’re going to get what they want.

.x.

When Draco’s parents finally leave the Dursley’s house, it is with Aunt Petunia’s unhappy permission for Harry to visit their home whenever he pleases.

There is no explanation as to why Aunt Petunia agrees to let Harry swan off to a friend’s house instead of picking up the excess housework, as Dudley complains loudly. There is especially no explanation for how they arrive at Harry getting cleared to go to Draco’s house straight after school, without even checking in with Aunt Petunia or Uncle Vernon first.

To Harry, it’s fairly obvious that his visits to the Malfoys’ carry an implicit interest in the fact that Harry is--is a wizard. He’s magic, just like the Malfoys. The Dursleys do not know this, and Harry doesn’t plan to be the one to tell them on the basis that it would probably only rile them up again and maybe make them want to revisit the issue.

There is a mutual and unspoken agreement not to discuss it any further.

After Draco and his parents leave, Harry makes a tactical retreat to his cupboard before anyone else can think of sending him there, and huddles on his cot. By the time the Dursleys have watched all their evening shows and then shuffled upstairs to bed,Nobody has come to lock his door, so Harry quietly goes back out and eats some of the leftovers from dinner. He doesn’t want to risk drawing anyone’s attention back downstairs with the buzzing and beeping of the microwave, and the oven would take too long, so he eats the jacket potatoes cold.

  
The next day is Saturday, but instead of being woken up to tend the kitchen, or the garden, or the laundry, Harry is left alone while the Dursleys take an unscheduled trip. This is signaled by the slamming of the front door, and then the sound of the car engine turning over and running until it fades away down the street.

Harry, unsure when the Dursleys will come back, stays inside his cupboard. Against all odds, even though his body and his thoughts are wound tight with anxiety, Harry falls asleep. He doesn’t wake up again until the evening. He feels restless and weird for having slept through the daylight hours instead of working on chores. The house is silent.

For the second night in a row, Harry goes about his business in the dark, digging through the Tupperware in the fridge and washing up in the downstairs bathroom. He even does his homework. He’s never gotten through it so quickly.

On Sunday, the Dursleys only return in time to eat dinner at home. Uncle Vernon opening the front door wakes Harry up right in the middle of a dream he can’t even recall a few minutes later. He’s glad he’s in his cupboard, with the door closed and none of the lights on. Whether they’re deliberately avoiding him, or they’ve really forgotten he’s under the stairs, Harry is just thankful he only has to make it until the morning when he can escape to school.

The Dursleys clearly aren’t happy to see Harry go, but they’ve always been equally displeased to have him stay. Uncle Vernon likes to say you can’t please all of the people all of the time, and Harry figures it’s about time Uncle Vernon was the one disappointed.

.x.

On Monday, it’s pouring rain. Draco grabs Harry’s elbow as he’s stepping off the bus in the afternoon and says, “You’re coming to my house today.” Then he sets off in the opposite direction of Privet Drive, pulling Harry behind him by his coat sleeve.

This weather may be just fine for Draco, who has a genuine school coat, but Harry only has Dudley’s old fleece zip-up. Even being two years old, it’s still too big all the way around. In contrast, Draco’s coat looks like it was cut specifically for him, and has the school crest sewn over the breast. Harry can only imagine how they look to observers, two equally grey splotches of comically different sizes against the fog, slouching together through the driving rain.

The homes on Magnolia Crescent are all detached houses. Some of them even have double garages. Draco pulls Harry around to a house just a few in from the intersection with Magnolia Road. Draco’s dad had in no way been exaggerating--their house really is much bigger and nicer than Dursleys’. It’s bigger and nicer than the other houses on the road, too. There’s a garden more extravagant than Aunt Petunia’s, with bright blurs of flowers dabbed in among the shrubs and climbing up trellises like watercolors. Instead of the the brown brick exterior common to Privet Drive, Draco’s house has a stately stone facade.

It’s an altogether unnecessarily nice building for being in Little Whinging, which Harry is coming to suspect is the point.

.x.

Inside the house, Draco tells him, “I don’t know _how_ you put up with that Dudley boy,” as he stomps upstairs, tracking mud all over the shiny black hardwood. He strips off his heavy school coat and drops it in a soggy heap right in the middle of his bedroom doorway, so Harry has to step over it as he follows him inside. “He’s the most vile, disrespectful, entitled, repugnant individual I’ve ever met.”

“You got all that from standing in the same room as him for 10 minutes?” Harry says disbelievingly. It’s the second thought that pops into his head at Draco’s proclamation, immediately after the uncharitable judgment that it takes one to know one.

Draco braces himself against a bookshelf on the wall with one hand while he pulls off his shoes and socks with the other. He stares right at Harry. “Are you saying he’s not?”

“Definitely not,” Harry says. There is nothing to gain and many things to lose if Draco were to start looking on Dudley more favorably.

Draco slashes through the air with one hand in a very _there you go, then_ flourish, which also serves to fling his shoes through the air toward his wardrobe. Then he walks over to his bed and flops backwards into the duvet.

.x.

It’s as Harry is standing there, with his wet socks in his wet shoes and his everything else entirely saturated with rainwater, as he’s wondering if it is worse to get muddy water all over the hardwood or the nice, fluffy white rug that extends from beneath Draco’s bed, that he realizes: there is nothing magical about Draco’s room.

To be sure, it is nothing short of astonishing that Harry is in someone else’s home by invitation rather than being dumped there like an unwanted pet right before holidays.

But Draco’s room is very unexceptional. In some ways, it’s even like Dudley’s. There’s no television, broken or otherwise, but Draco has the same model remote control airplane and a glass terrarium. His furniture is all made of some bright, golden wood, and looks less like something from an Arthurian legend than something you could order from any sufficiently posh department store in London. Draco’s bed is a massive four-poster with several pillows and heavy, white curtains drawn back with shiny grey ties. There’s a roll top desk in the corner with drawers all the way down to the floor, a wide wardrobe on the left wall, and two bookcases on the right. The whole room is light, and airy, and remarkably clean for a boy who has to be reminded not to leave his food wrappers on the library table every day.

There is nothing floating, or spinning, or glowing, or bubbling. There’s nothing out of the ordinary.

On his bed, Draco pushes himself up to his elbows, and looks at Harry. “What? What are you just standing there for?”

The thing is, for all that thoughts of magic and being a wizard have been gathering up in Harry’s head like bubbles packed in the space right under the cap of a fizzy drink, they haven’t actually talked about it. Not since the first week, when Harry had clammed up every time Draco mentioned spells or flying brooms.

Maybe it’s too late.

Maybe Draco was wrong, or the whole thing was always just a fabrication. An outrageous fantasy that the Dursleys were a long-running but ultimately trivial appendix to the life Harry was supposed to have. One that could be corrected.

The only thing more terrifying than the possibility that magic is real is the possibility that it’s not.

Harry opens his mouth. He means to apologize for getting rainwater all over Draco’s nice things, but what comes out of his mouth is, “I’ve never seen you do any magic.”

Draco squints at Harry. He says, “Well, obviously. That’s because I can’t.”

.x.

“I mean, I’m not a squib,” Draco says, which is a word Harry has never heard before, but is not, going by the way Draco’s mouth curls, something he’d want to be. “I’m a Malfoy.”

Harry says, “I know that,” even though he does not know _what_ that means he is supposed to know.

Draco keeps squinting. He slides off of his bed and walks across the white rug and the hardwood floor in his bare feet until he’s standing very, very close. Harry has only known Draco for a month, and he is still getting used to the idea that Draco might intrude on his space at any time and then pass back out without hurting him.

Harry shivers. The thermostat in Draco’s room is probably set to a perfectly comfortable temperature, but Harry’s clothes are still wet and his skin is going cold.

Draco’s eyes go over Harry’s face, solemn and searching. He tells Harry, “You need to change. You’re going to be sick.”

Harry blinks at him. “This is all I have,” he tells him. He feels like it’s the wrong thing to say, even though it’s the truth.

“I think we’re about the same size,” Draco judges, and starts pulling things out of his wardrobe.

A few minutes later, Harry’s pulled off the lumpy grey clothes he’d worn to school and put on a pair of Draco’s slacks and a soft, long-sleeved shirt instead. Draco’s clothes are uncomfortably too tight. The sleeves end right at his wrists, and the pants have hardly any extra room in them at all.

“Just leave those there,” Draco says of Harry’s wet clothes, pointing toward his own coat in the doorway. He mutters something that sounds like he thinks they should be burned.

Harry puts his pile of wet school things down beside Draco’s without arguing. If Draco doesn’t care about all the water getting on the floor, then it’s certainly not his place to. Without wet socks on, the feeling is beginning to return to his toes.

“Come on,” Draco says next, “I want to show you something.”

.x.

What Draco wants to show him is books. The book shelves in his room aren’t just full, they’re lined two rows deep with dull-colored hardcovers. The first few Draco pulls out aren’t even in English.

“Why are these all French?” Harry asks, carefully turning pages near the back of a book with a bumpy spine as they both sit cross-legged before the book shelves. “Wait, are you French?”

“We’re _not_ French,” Draco denies hotly, looking scandalized. “Why would you--”

“Your name’s French,” Harry points out. “...I think.”

Draco rolls his eyes up to the ceiling and admits, “All right, yes, a long, long, long time ago, Father’s family came over with the Normans, but Mother’s family is English all the way back.” He levels a displeased look back down at Harry. “The books are in French because I got them in France.”

Harry tries out the one eyebrow thing again, because practice makes perfect. “So you are French.”

“I was born in Wiltshire,” Draco snaps.

“You can read these, though, right? You speak French.” Harry is integrating this new facet of Draco into his perception of the other boy. He’s honestly not trying to poke fun, but Draco doesn’t see it that way.

“Yes, I speak French,” Draco says, “it’s a funny thing that happens sometimes when you live in France for most of your life.”

Harry’s know Draco’s being sarcastic, but living in France sounds genuinely nice to him. He’s never even been to London proper.

Before he can say so, Draco asks hotly, “Do you think this is normal? Wizards mixing with muggles, living in their cities, going to their schools, hiding what we are?”

Harry doesn’t know. Clearly, the right answer is _no_ , but, “I don’t even know what a muggle is,” Harry tells Draco. There’s hiding now? He’d just started to believe the way the Durlseys had tried to bury any mention of magic was the exception. That even if people didn’t believe magic was real, they wanted it to be.

But Draco had told him from the beginning, he shouldn’t tell other people about being a wizard. Was that just how magic was, hidden and shameful?

Draco stands up and paces a few times in agitation. Then he stops on the far side of the bookshelves, arms crossed over his chest. Harry looks down at the open book so he doesn’t have to look at Draco’s face. The page he’s turned to could be explaining how to turn people into frogs, or it could be about field crops in the 11th century. The pictures are a little ambiguous.

He wonders if Draco regrets talking to him that first day. He wonders if Draco’s decided inviting Harry home and giving him different clothes and talking about being a wizard was all a waste of time after all.

.x.

“You really don’t know anything, do you?” Draco asks eventually. He’s still standing, and Harry’s still sitting, so Draco is literally looking down on him right now.

He’s much quieter than Harry expected him to be. Harry had expected him to yell, but he’s barely even raising his voice.

Harry’s shoulders are beginning to hurt from how tense he is. “I guess I don’t,” he says, and then holds his mouth closed so tightly he can hear his jaw creaking.

Draco makes a sort of frustrated groan and sits back down beside Harry. “A muggle is everyone who isn’t a witch or a wizard,” he explains, “or a squib, like your aunt. And they’re dangerous.”

Harry doesn’t feel like he can look at Draco again, which is unfortunate, because Draco seems determined not to say anything else until Harry meets his gaze again.

“This isn’t normal,” Draco tells him emphatically, eyes wide and piercing. “We had our own world away from all of this. No muggles. But there was a war, before we were born. A war over all of Britain.”

That had not been in any of the library books. The last great magical war according to those books was the one between Merlin and Morgana.

Harry was going to need new books.

“And that war never really ended. A lot of people on both sides died, but no one agreed on who’d lost. Nothing got any better, everything just go worse.” Draco says the last part like he’d personally contributed significant effort towards a certain outcome, only to be disappointed in the end.

Draco says, “Nobody knew who to trust.” He’s still looking at Harry, but his expression is distant, like he’s trying to remember the answers to a test. “It was...dangerous. Neighbors killing neighbors. Witches and wizards killing each other because, because they didn’t want to be the ones killed. So everyone left.”

.x.

Draco closes his eyes and breathes heavily through his nose a few times before he opens them again. He says, “All the wizarding stores and the wizarding schools and the wizarding towns all across Britain went empty. The house I was born in, in Wiltshire? I haven’t been back there since before I can remember.”

Harry’s head feels heavy. He feels like he’s trying to walk in a straight line right after spinning blindfolded in a circle. There is an entire world where Harry belongs, Draco is telling him, and in the same breath he says it is so dangerous that Harry can never go there.

Draco puts his hands in his lap, but he’s still staring intensely at Harry’s face. “In France, it was normal. Everyone I knew was a witch or a wizard. But you’re the only other wizard I know, here.”

“And Borsely,” Harry says, because he feels like it bears mentioning. His knowledge about this entire situation is too scarce and new for him to feel comfortable leaving anything out yet.

Draco, unswayed, complains, “Borsely doesn’t count. And you don’t know anything.”

Harsh, but true. There’d been a war that changed the entire course of people’s lives, that had driven Draco’s family from their home in Wiltshire all the way to France and then somehow back again to Surrey, to Stonewall High. To Harry. How different would Draco’s life have been, if it weren’t for the war? How different would his own?

And Harry hadn’t even known anything about this war until ten minutes ago. If this is real, if Harry is a wizard and magic exists, these are things he should know. Fundamental, essential facts about the world and his place in it.

“All right,” Harry says, “I don’t know anything. So _tell_ me.”

.x.

“Why can’t you do any magic?” Harry asks. They’re still in front of the book shelves, but now they’re facing each other, knees nearly touching.

That was probably not the best place to start. Draco looks even more sour than he had just a few minutes ago. “Because I’m not supposed to,” he answers. “I’m not allowed.”

“What do you mean, ‘not allowed’?” Harry repeats. “Like it’s illegal? Is there--magical law enforcement?” he asks incredulously

But Draco says, “Yes,” with a serious expression. “It’s very illegal for underage wizards to go around just practicing magic. And I don’t have my own wand, anyway.”

Every single person Harry has met before Draco has also not had a wand, so really, it shouldn’t be such a surprise. Still. “How do you not have a wand? That’s basic wizarding. I know that much.”

“Father wanted to get me one in France, or Belgium, but Mother says only Ollivander’s will do for a British wizard. And that’s not an option right now.” Draco sighs dramatically at the ceiling. He tilts his head back so all Harry can see is the way his jaw connects to his throat and his chin. Draco’s chin is very pointy, especially pointing at the ceiling like that.

“Oh,” Harry says. “Well, ok. If you could do a spell right now,” he continues, and Draco drops his head back down and unfolds his arms, “if you could, what could you do?”

Draco, finally, looks as excited as he had when they first got off the bus. “I know lumos,” he says smoothly, “of course. That’s for when you need a light. Alohomora, for unlocking things. The jelly-legs jinx, and loads of hexes. I know one that’ll give you orange and purple boils absolutely everywhere, and they last for days.”

“Really? I wish you could--not the boil one, or a hex,” he says hastily. He drums his fingers against his knees. “One of the others. One that doesn’t hurt.”

Draco smirks. “I _can_ ,” Draco reminds him. “Just not now. Some other time. And it’ll be brilliant, you’ll see. Course,” Draco says, drawing it out, tilting his head so he’s looking at Harry slyly from the corner of his eyes. “That’s all just baby stuff. It’s _nothing._ ”

Harry slides his feet from beneath his knees and wiggles his toes. “What do you mean?”

“I was supposed to go to Hogwarts this year, learn some real magic.”

“Is that in France?” Harry frowns, confused. “Did you not go because you came back here?”

“Does it _sound_ French?” Draco asks with his face scrunched up scornfully, then he answers his own question. “No, it’s not. It’s in Scotland, I think.”

“So why didn’t you go?” Harry asks.

“Hogwarts,” Draco repeats annoyingly. “It’s a _wizarding_ school.”

Oh.

.x.

After that, Draco is more manic than melancholic. By the time the sky’s gone dark with the setting sun instead of just clouds, he’s decided he wants Harry to stay for dinner. But Harry is still in mild disbelief that this afternoon hasn’t turned out to be an exceedingly long dream. He insists on returning to the Dursleys’. He changes back into his own clothes, which are surprisingly dry even though they’ve been sitting in a heap beside Draco’s equally wet coat the entire time.

Mrs. Malfoy drives him home. The streetlights are on and it’s the same route he walks every afternoon, but she insists. Draco invites himself along. As they’re fastening their seat belts, waiting for Draco’s mother to walk around the front of the car and get in the driver’s seat, Draco leans over and whispers with quiet excitement, “She never drove before in France. Witches don’t drive, you know.”

Harry leans over and whispers back hurriedly, “But she knows how to, right?” He feels suddenly alarmed, watching Mrs. Malfoy draw close to the door, the streetlights outside throwing her long shadow across the front seats.

“Oh, yeah,” Draco assures him, “Uncle Severus taught her.”

Mrs. Malfoy opens the door and gets inside, so Draco stops talking.

It takes just a few minutes in which they don’t crash to get from the Malfoys’ home to the Dursleys’. Harry climbs out of the back with a quick, “Thanks,” shuts the door, and walks up the short path to the front door. He hopes the front door is unlocked. Mrs. Malfoy, who is slowly unveiling herself as an actively protective force, does not appear to be in the mood to be persuaded away until she’s seem him go inside.

The front door is not unlocked.

There is a spell for unlocking, he thinks. Harry’s pretty sure Draco mentioned that. He wishes he knew it.

Harry has said the Dursleys do not like him. He’d told Draco, and Draco had not taken him seriously enough. And now here they all are, trapped together in the awkward realization that the people on the other side of the door have not been eagerly anticipating Harry’s return. In fact, they would be much happier if he just left and never came back.

It feels like he stands on the front stoop for a long time, but Harry’s aware that could be because he can hear the car idling in the street behind him, and can see in his mind the way Mrs. Malfoy and Draco must be watching him. Mrs. Malfoy turned just so in the driver’s seat. Draco, seat belt twisted behind him, with his nose pressed close to the window glass and his shoulders set parallel to the door.

.x.

The Mrs. Malfoy in Harry’s brain has just become impatient, reaching for the door handle, when Aunt Petunia finally, finally opens the door.

“Well, get in,” Aunt Petunia says, and hurries him into the house. She closes the door behind him immediately, without a glance out to the curb where Mrs. Malfoy and Draco still sit in the idling car. They stand facing each other in the foyer, Aunt Petunia with her back to the door and Harry with his to the stairs. To the sitting room where Dudley and Uncle Vernon have the television turned up much too loudly.

Aunt Petunia puts her hands on her hips. “I don’t suppose they fed you,” she says with disdain. Never mind the fact that she could rarely be accused of doing the same herself.

“No, Aunt Petunia,” Harry replies.

“Well,” she says yet again. “Go on then. Food, and then straight up to your room.”

Harry blinks at her through a paralyzing confusion. “Sorry. Up where?”

“To your _room_ ,” Aunt Petunia repeats, “the bedroom. Upstairs.”

Harry doesn’t have a room upstairs. He has always slept in the cupboard under the stairs. There are three bedrooms in the house, one for his Aunt and Uncle, one for Dudley, and one for Dudley’s things after he’s broken them.

“Do you mean...Dudley’s toy room?” he tries to clarify.

“We talked it over,” Aunt Petunia says, and she is still looking at him, but she is not meeting his eyes. “And we’ve agreed that as a growing boy, it’s time you have a bit more. Space. Up you go. Your uncle already moved all of your things for you.”

With that, Aunt Petunia turns and disappears into the sitting room.

When Harry checks, his cot under the stairs is missing all of his blankets and the second-hand clothes from Dudley are no longer folded on the little jutting shelves. Instead, there’s a pile of broken gifts from birthdays or family trips or just because Dudley threw a tantrum for them in the space Harry’s always slept.

.x.

Harry goes into the kitchen, vaguely light-headed, and eats the slice of ham, the steamed peas, and hard dinner roll still plated on the table. They’re cold. Then he washes up after himself, and goes upstairs. The Durlseys are all facing the television when he goes by. None of them look up.

Harry flicks on the light in the bedroom that used to hold all of Dudley’s old things. Now, about half of the things Dudley’s discarded inside have been shoved into one corner. Harry’s clothes and school bag are all on the floor, between the narrow bed and the narrow desk pushed up to the room’s only window.

Dudley’s books, not a single one of which is about magic or wizards, are all lined up in the bookshelf beside desk, untouched.

Ten years living with the Dursleys, and this is the first time Harry has a bedroom. It is objectively a improvement over his previous situation. There are probably less spiders, for one thing. There’s room for an entire bed instead of just a cot, for another. There’s a window, so there will always be light during the day at least, and Dudley can’t stomp up the stairs just to make plaster rain down on Harry’s head.

Harry feels overwhelmed, but not in a good way. Three weeks ago, Harry slept in a cupboard in his aunt and uncle’s house. He was not magic, and he wasn’t special, and he wasn’t wanted. Now, he still wasn’t wanted, mostly, and no matter what Draco says, he might not be magic. And if he’s not magic, then he really isn’t special.

He’s just Harry Potter. And he’s still very much alone.

He barely sleeps that night.

.x.

Draco is not Harry’s first friend. Harry’s first friend was a girl named Riya. Riya had little gold bracelets, and thick, dark hair like Harry’s. The nursery teacher sat them together at snack time and story time. They were friends up until Riya’s family moved away, right before primary school.

Harry’s second friend was a ginger boy named Herbert. They weren’t in the same class, but they picked the same corner of the playground during break on the first day of school. Herbert got picked on nearly as much as Harry did, even without Dudley’s influence. Then Dudley did get involved, to make it clear that Herbert’s indifference was worth more than Harry’s companionship.

So Draco’s not Harry’s first friend, or his longest lasting, or even his nicest. But Harry would like this friendship to stick. Third time and all that, right?

The problem is, Harry doesn’t really know why they’re friends. And that makes it difficult to determine how best to ensure they remain friends.

They don’t have anything in common (except--well.). Draco is judgmental and rude and haughty, sometimes even to Harry. But he always knows exactly which of Dudley’s bullying gang have been the nastiest to Harry on any given day, and he is blatantly pleased with belittling or framing each of them in his turn, often in a manner poetically befitting the way they were most recently awful to Harry. Draco brings all of Harry’s favorite sweets for lunch. And he always, always reacts the same way to seeing Harry after any amount of time apart-- with unadulterated delight.

On the one the hand, it’s as if Draco genuinely likes Harry, which is is possible, and definitely Harry’s preferred explanation. On the other hand, he hasn’t forgotten that at least part of the reason they’re friends is because Draco’s father wants them to be. Enough to move his family from France, where they didn’t have to hide or lie, to Little Whinging, where there is decisively no magic, just so Draco could go to Stonewall High with Harry.

That first day, Harry hadn’t even had to introduce himself. Draco had just already known, already been so excited.

That called for further investigation, didn’t it?

.x.

“I need to ask you a question,” Harry says. They’re in Draco’s room again. Harry is sitting at Draco’s desk because it’s the only place to sit in Draco’s room other than his bed.

They both have homework they should be doing--History for Draco, Literature for Harry--so he feels a twinge of guilt for bringing it up, first, and second for bringing it up now when it’s a distraction, but he can’t sit on it any longer.

Draco, who is as usual all about distractions, eagerly tosses his book to the side and swings his attention to Harry. “So ask.”

“I need you to answer me truthfully,” Harry prefaces.

On his bed, Draco makes an impatient expression, the one that involves his lips pulling back on one side so all the teeth there are exposed in a sort of sneer. “Yes, ok, truthfully. As if I’ve _lied_ to you before, Harry, honestly.”

Harry drops his pencil into the binding of his textbook. “You said your father sent you to find me.”

The foot Draco’s got crossed over his knee wiggles a few times, but his expression remains mildly irritated. “No, I didn’t. I said you’re the reason Father is making me show my face at that barbaric muggle prison. Also why I have to write a lousy essay about the Tudors. As if anyone even car--”

Harry cuts him off before he can build any more steam. “Fine. Your father sent you to Stonewall because he knew I was there. Just because I was there.”

“You’re not asking a question,” Draco points out in an deliberately infuriating drawl when Harry doesn’t keep going.

Suddenly nervous, Harry tries to take a deep breath, but it sticks halfway down his throat. “ _Why?_ ” Harry asks.

Draco’s leg stops bouncing. “I can’t tell you that,” he says immediately. He drags his book back into his lap and opens it back up.

.x.

Harry feels something in his chest go simultaneously hollow and leaden. “You mean you don’t even know? You’re just doing it because--”

“I _know_ ,” Draco retorts, glancing quickly up at Harry and then back down at the book. Harry can tell he’s not on the right page. “I just shouldn’t--say why.”

“Shouldn’t say what why?” Harry asks around his collapsed lungs.

Draco’s response to the clumsy composition of his sentence is an uncomplimentary look. Then he says, “You wouldn’t take it well.”

Flushing, Harry strikes back with an accusatory, “You’ve got to see how this looks.”

“How does it look?” Draco demands, clearly losing the battle with himself to end to the conversation and go back to his boring muggle homework.

“It looks _bad_ , Draco. Like you’re planning to harvest my kidneys, or--or my spleen!” He doesn’t think that will literally happen, but it is the closest he can get to voicing the concern that maybe all of this is because there is something inside of him that Draco wants for himself.

But Draco just asks in confusion, “What would I even do with a human kidney?”

“Sell it on the black market,” Harry answers.

“Is that profitable?” Draco checks.

“Is it pro--” He is absolutely not going to tell Draco that. “That’s not the way you reassure someone everything’s normal and fine.”

Every time Harry thinks he’s gotten his bearings in his new reality, Draco leads him out over black ice. Harry thought he was uniquely freakish, but Draco said no, you’re just a wizard. There’s loads of us. Harry thought he’d be inducted to a community where people were like him and would like him, but Draco said no, that world is gone, abandoned after a deadly war, and all its inhabitants were scattered to the wind.

Harry thought even if Draco was only his friend because Draco's dad said he had to be, then he could be ok with that. But Draco said no, that's not what's happening at all.

.x.

After a fairly lengthy pause, Draco composes his expression into something somber and concedes, “All right,” like he wasn’t planning on telling Harry all along. “What do you know about your parents?”

“Nothing,” Harry says, and ignores the weird twist Draco’s face takes. “They’re dead. They died in a car crash when I was really little. What does that-- ”

“They didn’t die in a car crash,” Draco says with an uncomfortable look toward his bedroom door. The door is open. There’d been no reason to close it.

Harry has very little doubt that Draco is telling the truth, but he still asks, “How would you know that?”

“Everyone knows that,” Draco assures him. “They died in the war.”

In a way, it’s a relief. It’s like Harry can feel the weight he is just beginning to understand is in his name sliding off his shoulders and onto theirs. This is all just because his parents were war heroes. “So that’s why you knew who I was. Because of my parents.”

“No, that’s not it,” Draco shakes his head. “Harry, your parents were murdered by one of the strongest wizards of our time. He killed hundreds and hundreds of people. But he couldn’t kill _you_.”

Harry just stares at him.

Draco says, “And there are a lot of people who’d like another chance at it.”

“You said everyone left.” It doesn’t sound like his voice. It sounds lost, and childish, and too quiet for Draco to even hear.

But Draco does. “Not everyone.”


	2. Believe it's not so

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this episode: Harry and Draco get a new school.
> 
> More explicit child abuse and homophobic and racist language.

Harry thinks he’s handling the whole ever-present-threat-against-his-life situation pretty well.

 

In fact, there’s very little to handle--nothing really changes. Harry still goes to school, still eats in the library, still rides the bus home with Draco. If he arranges his days so that he is never really alone, well, Piers and the other boys still go to Stonewall High, too, and no one has told _them_ about Harry’s shiny new status as an endangered, but powerful wizard.

 

“No one’s going to find you,” Draco says at least once a week. “Not while my parents are around.”

 

To which Harry always makes the counterpoint, “ _You_ found me.”

 

“And now no one else will,” Draco answers automatically. This isn’t a conversation anymore, just a script they roll out and follow when Harry thinks too long about the idea that there are people who know his name foremost because they want to see it on his gravestone.

 

It’s not that comforting, but. Life goes on.

 

.x.

 

“Hey,” Harry says, “How did you know Borsely was a wizard?”

 

“He has a wand,” Draco answers.

 

“I think I would have noticed a wand,” Harry tells him.

 

“It sticks out the top of his bag.”

 

A moment of silence while Harry thinks about Borsely, in the corridor between classes. “Draco. That’s his drumstick. He plays drums.”

 

.x.

 

Harry does almost all of his homework at Draco’s house. Draco’s parents don’t approve of the time he spends thinking about muggle problems for his muggle school, but they don’t stop him, which is more than he can say for his aunt and uncle.

 

Draco, after a brief stint of the most minimal effort, does not do his homework. He lazes around with magical books, or puts on records by wizarding bands Harry’s never heard of, making a distraction of himself until Harry gives up trying to remember the difference between plant cells and animal cells or how to do factorization, and engages.

 

It would be unfair to call Draco a poor student. Really, it’s only muggle things he doesn’t care about.

 

Magic holds Draco fast as wet cement.

 

Draco has his favorite topics when it comes to magic (the complete history of brooms as a mode of personal transportation and astronomy, mainly), but he’ll listen to anything as long as it has to do with the things his parents left behind. Draco sits attentively through botany lessons, the genealogies of families who might all have died out now, etiquette, even the ways of old land treaties.

 

.x.

 

For the most part, Mrs. Malfoy has been the one dispensing their magical lessons. So far, she has taught them the winter constellations, why most cauldrons are made of pewter, where the napkins go at every stage of a meal, and how to recognize and counter five common jinxes. Mr. Malfoy has taught them about all the flowering plants in Mrs. Malfoy’s garden, the proper way to hold a knife to cut ingredients efficiently and quickly, and three charms to see in the dark.

 

Mrs. Malfoy teaches them wherever they happen to be, though she likes to do the flashier things inside where there are fewer prying eyes. She’s precise and composed when she’s doing wandwork, and she only lets them ask questions after she’s finished her explanations.

 

Mr. Malfoy likes to have lessons in his study, which is just an extra little room on the ground floor in the middle of the house. Almost as if after the builders had done the front room and the kitchen and all, they’d realized there was extra space left over they should probably do something with. Or like someone else, unsatisfied with the rooms there already were, had pushed everything aside just a little, just enough, for all Mr. Malfoy’s bookshelves, and his desk, and the green sofa that is sometimes chairs instead.

 

Everything in the Malfoys’ house is magic, magic, magic. Harry can’t believe he’d ever thought it wasn’t.

 

.x.

 

Draco’s absolute favorite thing to ask about is Hogwarts.

 

“Tell me about the Great Hall,” Draco says, and Mr. Malfoy details the feasts laid across the house tables, the morning post when the owls all swooped across the enchanted ceiling with letters and packages from home.

 

“What about the forest?” Draco asks, and Mrs. Malfoy tells them how lovely, how dark, how deep the forest ran, and about the deadly creatures that ran in it.

 

There were ghosts at Hogwarts, Harry learns, literal ghosts who swept through the halls and could be anything between helpful and disruptive depending on their mood. There were quiet, fire-lit basements where you could take refuge from the harsh Scottish winter and nagging teachers, there were lakes whose depths veiled and revealed all manners of beautiful things in turn, a bathroom on the seventh floor that was only there when you really needed it, and secret tunnels into the kitchens. There was the school train, scarlet and majestic, and carved wooden carriages drawn by things you never wanted to be unlucky enough to see.

 

Draco demands every detail, claims every half-remembered nook and square centimeter of Hogwarts with an eager greed Harry can slowly feel unwinding in himself.

 

.x.

 

Draco apparently isn’t the only one who does best when inspired. Dudley has been learning all kinds of things at his new school.

 

“I get it now,” Dudley announces smugly, taking up the space in front of the bedroom door when Harry tries to go to the bathroom and brush his teeth before going to sleep.

 

Maybe it’s just that Harry’s grown more used to Draco in particular being in his personal space, but it seems like whatever fancy public schools like Smeltings feed boys like Dudley has grown him bigger and meaner than ever before.

 

Harry steels his shoulders. He’d had a good day. He’d gotten an alright grade on his last science test. His Literature teacher had been out sick, so they hadn’t had to do their scheduled presentations. Draco’s mom had packed them both a nice stew and slices of chocolate cake, and then at the Malfoys’ that afternoon, they’d learned about black hellebore.

 

Dudley leans in through Harry’s open door. “That Deano kid--”

 

“Draco,” Harry corrects automatically. Draco hates it when the kids at school call him the wrong name.

 

“Whatever,” Dudley says. He braces his hands on either side of the door frame. “So, how much did they buy you for? That’s what your lot does, isn’t it?”

 

 _My lot,_ Harry’s brain echoes, and there is a new, stuttering sidestep in his thoughts that tentatively fills in _wizards,_ before the past 10 years reassert themselves and remind Harry that Dudley does not know about magic. Dudley only knows about Harry’s dark, thick hair that won’t lie the way Aunt Petunia wants it to, and how Dudley burns and burns all summer long even though Harry is the one in the garden.

 

Harry tells his cousin, “You shut up.” The old, familiar heat is rising up in his throat.

 

Dudley, of course, does not shut up. “I know all about it. Sell the kids off for marriage before they grow up, and everyone realizes how worthless you really are. Right? It’s _primitive_.”

 

.x.

 

“Whatever your boyfriend’s parents offered to have you, it wasn’t enough,” Dudley tells Harry as he takes a step forward, forcing Harry back into the room.

 

“Which is it?” Harry demands. He’s not heedless of the floorboards creaking under Dudley’s girth. It’s just the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears is sufficiently loud to ignore it. “Am I worthless, or did your parents get ripped off?”

 

Dudley’s smile drops and his pink face squeezes into a flushed, red scowl. “You think you’re clever,” Dudley taunts. “But I know you’re just a stupid, ugly, ungrateful little batty boy.”

 

Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon are at a dinner party, and the sitter has the television turned up loudly enough that Harry can follow the plot from the bedroom with the door closed. It’s the only reason Dudley’s being so bold, using language even Aunt Petunia would object to.

 

Dudley unwraps one hand from the door frame to grab Harry’s pajama shirt. It’s one of Dudley’s old footy jerseys. His fist is wrapped right around the screen printed numbers and team name.

 

“You’re so useless. If your father were still alive,” Dudley goads with a sharp tug of the jersey that snaps Harry’s head back, “he’d have sold you away ages ago just to be rid of you.”

 

Harry doesn’t see red. He doesn’t feel out of control at all when he headbutts Dudley in the nose. Dudley howls and lets go of both Harry and the door. Harry takes advantage of Dudley’s surprise to elbow him in the side and squeeze past him into the corridor.

 

Behind him, Dudley screams and stomps around with footsteps that rattle the floor, like the epicenter of an earthquake. _“You’re dead, you’re dead! You wait until Mum and Dad come back, you freak!_ ”

 

.x.

 

It would be in Harry’s best interest to get out of the house right now. It would have been in his best interest 30 seconds ago to keep his mouth closed and put nightshade berries in Dudley’s syrup one morning. Just one berry, just enough to make him sick. Dudley wouldn’t have had a clue what had happened. Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon might have blamed Harry, but they wouldn’t _know_ because they didn’t know anything about potions and hexes. It would have just been because they always blame Harry whenever anything undesirable happened. Like Harry was the first and worst misfortune in their life, and everything uncomfortable that had ever happened to them thereafter flowed like a river directly from him.

 

It’s too late to keep quiet and poison Dudley or just get out of the house. Harry’s already headbutted Dudley, and the stairs are the only way to the front door, and Dudley has already screamed, which has drawn the sitter. She charges up the stairs.

 

“What is happening up here?” she demands when she reaches the top step, in the sort of tone adults used when their main grievance was having their attention drawn in the first place.

 

Dudley comes reeling out of the smallest bedroom with both hands clamped over his nose and mouth.

 

“What _happened_?” the sitter, Ms.Tillard, shrieks with a great deal more alarm. Harry is unfortunately within arms’ reach, and she catches him by his shoulder as she goes over to check on Dudley.

 

“He just attacked me,” Dudley wails, fat, fake tears pooling in his eyes.

 

Ms. Tillard pulls them both into the bathroom.

 

Harry presses up against the wall beside the bathroom door while Ms. Tillard pushes Dudley’s head over the sink and rinses away the thin trickle of blood over his lips.

 

“Honestly,” Ms. Tillard clucks while Dudley gasps and sniffles into the sink. “I expect more from the two of you, you’re big boys. I don’t know why you two have to fight instead of just working things out reasonably.”

 

“It’s his fault,” Dudley whines. “He broke my nose!”

 

 _Just shut up_ , Harry thinks to himself in a mantra. _Shut up, shut up, I didn’t do anything, I didn’t DO ANYTHING._ His head throbs with a dull pain, and not just in the place where it had connected with Dudley’s soft cartilage.

 

Ms. Tillard keeps splashing Dudley’s face with water. “I’ll be making a full report to your parents as soon as they get home,” she promises while the water runs.

 

Harry stays on the wall, pinned down by Ms. Tillard’s sharp gaze every time he glances toward the door. The tiles on the walls are sharply cool against the heat in Harry’s neck.

 

.x.

 

After, Ms. Tillard sends them to their rooms, Harry first.

 

“It’s you boys’ bedtime,” she says, as though this were an equitable conclusion. Dudley stands behind her and makes ugly faces that scrunch his supposedly broken nose while she herds Harry into the smallest room. She pulls the door closed. Then Harry hears the sound of the lock being clicked into place.

 

Dudley’s door does not have a lock.

 

Harry knows _Alohomora_ cold at this point. He could probably do it in his sleep. But he doesn’t have a wand, so the point’s moot. The lock remains.

 

Dudley’s door closes about 20 minutes later, which is just enough time for him to be given consolatory ice cream and leave the bowl in the sink without being asked to clean it.

 

Harry lies on the bed and plans. Once the Dursleys return, and Ms. Tillard makes her report and leaves for the night, and the front door closes, Harry will only have about 90 seconds before Uncle Vernon unlocks the bedroom door. Uncle Vernon is even bigger than Dudley, so the only chance Harry will have to slip out of the room is before Uncle Vernon comes in. Aunt Petunia will probably be on the stairs, but she’s as thin as Uncle Vernon isn’t, easy to get around. Through the front door and out to the street should only take 30 seconds. Draco’s house is nine minutes away, seven if he takes the shortcut, five and half if he sprints.

 

Harry crawls under the bed and pulls out his trainers from PE last year. He puts them on, laces them up, and then sits on the edge of the bed, waiting.

 

Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon come back, and the door opens and closes for the first time. Ms. Tillard doesn’t speak as loudly as she listens to the television, so Harry can hear the three adults talking, but he can’t hear what they’re talking about. The front door opens for the second time as Ms. Tillard leaves.

 

Uncle Vernon comes up the steps. Harry braces himself beside the door.

 

But Uncle Vernon stomps right by him, into the bedroom he shares with Aunt Petunia at the end of the corridor. He doesn’t even pause.

 

Aunt Petunia comes up next and goes into Dudley’s bedroom, where Dudley is fast asleep and snoring heavily.

 

Apparently, Ms. Tillard didn’t tell the Dursleys all about the fight after all.

 

Which means the ambush will come in the morning instead, when Dudley tells his parents over breakfast.

 

.x.

 

Except he doesn’t. When Dudley comes into the kitchen in the morning, he drops down into one of the empty chairs and turns on the television on the counter without a word.

 

Harry stares. It’s not like Dudley not to make a big production of any time Harry dares to do anything other than take his attacks lying down.

 

Aunt Petunia comes back into the kitchen and swoops down on Dudley immediately, grabbing his face and kissing his cheek. As Dudley is pushing her away, he looks up and catches Harry’s stare. “ _What?”_ Dudley snaps, Aunt Petunia’s arms still looped around his neck like a comically undersized yoke.

 

“Nothing,” Harry says quickly.

 

“So stop staring!” Dudley commands. He’s angry, but in his normal morning way, where he wants to watch his cartoons and eat bacon, but the commercials are on and Harry’s only turned out four pieces so far.

 

Harry stares a little longer, but Dudley’s face doesn’t show a single hint he’s thinking about last night at all. It’s like he’s totally forgotten it even happened.

 

“You’re such a freak,” Dudley says in disgust, and jerks around in his chair, thereby freeing himself from his mother’s embrace, turning his back to Harry, and facing the television head on all at once.

 

Aunt Petunia swoops down on Harry next, all the affection from just a moment prior swapped out with impatience. “Hurry up with that food, already, what’s the matter with you?”

 

.x.

 

At the Malfoys’ house, Harry and Draco spend most of their time in Draco’s room, or the room Harry thinks of as the –the second, unnecessary front room, which Draco and his parents call the drawing room.

 

In the drawing room, Draco drags two hard backed chairs together so they’re facing each other, their seats pressed flush along the front edge. He sit in one with his feet up on the cushion of the other. His knapsack is still sitting by the doorway, where he’d dropped it on the way in.

 

Halfway through his assignment on bicarmel legislature Harry asks, “Is being in the Wizengamot like being an MP?”

 

“What’s an MP?” Draco replies.

 

“How are you not failing everything?” Harry asks in sharp annoyance.

 

Draco gives Harry a sour look. “I’m a _wizard,_ ” he tells Harry, like it was a kind of exempting note marked down in his student file.

 

“I asked you if the Wizengamot was like being an MP,” Harry tells him, “and you asked me what an MP was.”

  
Draco, slouched down across his chairs, shrugs.

 

.x.

 

Harry waves his worksheet at Draco accusingly. “It’s literally in the curriculum!”

 

“Harry,” Draco sighs, “it really doesn’t matter.”

 

Draco goes back to the book open in his lap, which is blatantly about neither bicarmel legislature, nor (Draco’s assignment) poetry rhyming schemes. Several of the pictures are moving, for one. And Draco’s been engrossed with it since they arrived from school.

 

Harry tries to concentrate on his homework. But a few minutes later, he surrenders to his curiosity about Draco’s book instead. “What are you reading?” he hears himself asking as he pushes his school things aside.

 

Draco smirks at him. Draco being Draco, he could draw this out painfully. In fact, Harry expects him to. But Draco is apparently more excited about showing off than showing Harry up, and turns his book around immediately. On the page Draco’s turned to, there’s a bold ink drawing of a figure in bright blue robes, sitting on a broom.

 

There are tiny clouds drawn in at the bottom, like the broom is high up in the sky. As Harry watches, the figure gets knocked off her broom by a streak of movement across the page, and then hangs there from her broom by the tip of her fingers before pulling herself back up. She hovers midair again for a bit before the streak of movement cuts across the page in a different direction. This time, she dodges out of its path with a little flip in midair that’s completely in sync with Harry’s own stomach.

 

“Harry,” Draco says, “let me tell you about Quidditch.”

 

.x.

 

The first wand Harry uses is Mrs. Malfoy’s. And she explains to him for a full 15 minutes beforehand why Harry should not be disappointed or alarmed if his magic doesn’t work the right way with her wand. “In the words of the great Ollivanders,” she tells him at the end of this lecture, “’the wand chooses the wizard.’”

 

“I’d be loads better with my own wand,” Draco huffs afterwards, once they’ve finished the lesson and his mom’s sufficiently out of earshot. He’d done better than Harry, but not by much.

 

Harry has a feeling Draco says that a lot. (Draco, it transpires, does.)

 

They practice spells in turns with Draco’s parents most days, using either Mrs. Malfoy’s wand or her husband’s. Mrs. Malfoy was right, Harry thinks. His magic doesn’t seem to work the right way with either wand. Mr. Malfoy’s performed sluggishly, nearly reluctantly, while Mrs. Malfoy’s rebelled with a recoil that required even more energy to overcome than the spell itself.

 

It’s hard, adjusting to the idea that he can say some old Latin words he doesn’t understand and wave his hand around and make the model airplane in Draco’s room fly, but Harry’s pretty sure it shouldn’t be _this_ hard.

 

“It’s a little smothering,” Draco admits when Harry presses on whether Draco found it difficult to use his parents’ wands, too, “like if you were in bed, and it were summer, and it were really warm out, and someone put a wool blanket on you. But in a good way, you know?”

 

“Not really,” Harry says, because he doesn’t.  
  
“...Mom’s is a little easier, I think,” Draco confesses at length, vaguely sympathetic.

 

When Harry still hasn’t managed a simple _Lumos,_ though, there is no sympathy at all in Draco’s taunting, “Maybe you should try not being so awful at Latin.”

 

.x.

 

After a particularly disastrous wand lesson for Harry with Mrs. Malfoy, Mr. Malfoy takes time out of their next lesson to give them a pointed lecture about what seems at first to be irrelevant wand history.

 

Mr. Malfoy starts with, “In ancient times, a family wand was passed down as part of the inheritance bequethed unto the heir.”

 

Harry and Draco are sitting side-by-side on the green velvet sofa which is sometimes two chairs in Mr. Malfoy’s study. Mr. Malfoy is sitting behind his desk.

 

“That began to change in the early centuries of the Roman conquest in Britain,” Mr. Malfoy says while Draco looks on in wide-eyed enchantment.

 

Another of Draco’s favorite topics, probably because of his heavily regulated access to one, is wands.

 

Mr. Malfoy lectures in a steady, objective tone that makes it clear he expects them to internalise every fact he doles out the first time he says it. He doesn’t exactly smile during these lessons, but something about his expression always looks pleased.

 

Mr. Malfoy continues, “Roman armies brought Roman wizards, and then left Roman wizards, who settled down and had families. Now, let me be clear. In Britain, the heir apparent received the family wand upon his succession, generation after generation. There is powerful magic in blood after blood. However, it would be incommensurable to judge his wand against those of his siblings.

 

“Lesser heirs made their own wands in the same tradition from which family wands are derived, with a regard to the individual wielder’s temperament and affinity with the environment of their territory,” he says. “Roman wizards did not perfect wand-making, but if by nothing else but sheer numbers, they did shift the perception of new-made wands from an indictment of exclusion from the line of succession to a signal of practical and powerful capitalization on personal variation.”

 

“The wand chooses the wizard,” Draco recites dutifully, and angles a triumphant look sideways at Harry, who did not.

 

.x.

 

Mr. Malfoy pushes back his chair so he can pull his wand out of his pocket. Then, instead of handing them the wand or telling them what spell they’ll focus on today, Mr. Malfoy pauses. He puts his wand down in front of him on the desk, neatly squared on the blotter. He stares speculatively at Harry.

 

“You haven’t been having much luck with your spellcasting, have you, Harry?” Mr. Malfoy asks just as Harry’s heartbeat begins to pick up.

 

“No, sir,” Harry answers immediately, shamefully.

 

Mr. Malfoy rises from his chair then, taking up his own wand as he does. He comes to stand before them on the sofa. Mr. Malfoy points his wand at the door and uses a summoning spell. It takes a few moments, but eventually, a long brown box zips into the room and directly into Mr. Malfoy’s open hand. Where it came from in the house must have been far away.

 

The box looks like an oddly narrow shoe box. As Harry and Draco watch, Mr. Malfoy returns his own wand to his pocket and lifts the lid to reveal a rectangle of black satin, inside of which is nestled a honey gold wand.

 

Mr. Malfoy holds the open box out towards Harry and says, “Let’s have you try casting with this wand.”

 

Unlike the Malfoys’ wands, which have dark handles with thin, silver detailing, this wand is a stark, slightly crooked plain wood. If he’d picked it up from the side of the road over the summer, Harry would never have suspected what it really was.

 

Harry glances sideways at Draco, to gauge what his reaction should be. There is a clear argument on Draco’s face, an envy at not being offered a shot at the shiny new wand, too, being offered _first_ , but Draco doesn’t voice it.

 

“My wand was passed down to me by my father, as he received it from his father,” Mr. Malfoy says when Harry doesn’t make an immediate move to grab the plain brown wand. “It’s as I just explained. Blood calls to blood. Draco may have had more success than you thus far precisely because he’s had the advantage of using a wand that is one day destined to be his.”

 

If Mr. Malfoy thinks this wand will work better for Harry, then...

 

It’s unlikely to the point of impossible, even given the extent the Malfoys have gone to just to find Harry, to protect him and make sure he knows who he is. But Harry still asks.

 

He _has_ to ask.

 

“Is this my father’s wand?”

 

.x.

 

“It’s not,” Mr. Malfoy says gently. In his periphery, Harry sees Draco squirm sideways, trying to bow out of the emotional exhibition that’s unfolding. “But you may nonetheless find it more agreeable to you than a wand that already knows Draco to be its heir.”

 

Harry figures that’s fair and picks up the wand.

 

He can feel the difference immediately. Mrs. and Mr. Malfoy’s wands always felt like what they were, which was long wooden sticks. Sometimes, they even felt more in the way of his magic than anything else. This wand, though, feels magic all on its own.

 

Harry points the new wand toward one of the few spaces on the wall not covered by a bookshelf and gives it a wave, the way Mrs. Malfoy had shown him to.

 

His entire arm feels warm, but slightly too warm. Like lying under a blanket in the summer might feel. It feels like Harry’s skin is going to split open along his arm and spill out magic, or maybe his beating heart, but all that happens is a shower of sharply red sparks erupts in an arc and singes the wall paper where he’d been pointing.

 

Harry startles and drops his arm immediately. Not the wand, though. His fingers clench around the handle and don’t let go. His arm still feels warm, but less urgently so now that he isn’t pointing the wand at anything or trying to cast. Like a stove top a few minutes after it’s been turned off.

 

“That seems definitive,” Mr. Malfoy says. His pleased expression has grown two sizes. “We’ll have you use this one from now on.”

 

.x.

 

Mr. Malfoy pulls his own wand out of his pocket and hands it to Draco, whose face had been momentarily frozen in a sort of gobsmacked disbelief and now morphs into one of dawning delight.

 

Two wands means no more sharing, after all.

 

The spell Mr. Malfoy has them working on today is a smokescreen charm. Neither of them are terribly successful at it, not least of which because the fog Harry does manage to produce tends to go cartoonishly off-color. Both boys struggle to keep a straight face, but there is little doubt Mr. Malfoy isn’t fooled.

 

When the lesson’s over, Mr. Malfoy takes back both wands.

 

“Why can’t we keep Harry’s wand?” Draco protests as his dad takes the lid off the wand box. Like Harry, Draco has deduced one of the main reasons they haven’t been allowed more time with either of his parents’ wands has been due to concern over disarming either of the fully trained adults a moment longer than necessary.

 

“You may attract the wrong kind of attention, practicing spellwork with no supervision,” Mr. Malfoy tells Draco, referring again to the malicious intentions of wizards who weren’t done fighting a decade’s old war which shadowed Harry’s every step, now. “Not to mention the danger of unsupervised spell practice in the first place. No,” Mr. Malfoy decides, wrapping the wand back up in its box and sliding on the lid, “I will put this back in a safe place until the next time it’s needed. And I trust,” he adds, his pale eyes pinning them both down in place, “that it will remain there.”

 

Harry and Draco both jerk their heads in quick, emphatic agreement. Mr. Malfoy’s gaze lifts and drifts away. He dismisses them with a wave of his hand.

 

Harry rather wishes he could have kept the wand. But just knowing he’ll be able to use it again, to not have to fight through either of the Malfoys’ own wands as he tries and tries and tries to learn the most basic of magic, lifts his whole spirit.

 

.x.

 

Smeltings starts Christmas holiday two days before Stonewall. The Dursleys decide to take advantage of the extra time to visit Vernon’s family. Uncle Vernon makes it clear he expects Harry to stay home alone, eating the leftovers in the fridge (such as they are) and checking in with Ms. Tillard each night.

 

Mrs. Malfoy presents an alternative arrangement. Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia do not argue.

 

At the Malfoys, Harry sleeps in one of the guest rooms, where Mr. Malfoy spends a lesson trying to teach him and Draco how to transfigure the pattern on the pillowcases and the duvet cover. They manage to turn the bedclothes an unattractive, muddy green. Harry doesn’t care for it, but transfiguration turns out to be a lot more work than it looks, and he’s just grateful to collapse into the mattress at the end of the day. It’s the biggest, softest bed he’s ever slept on.

 

For Christmas, the Malfoys give Harry three new pairs of pants, four new shirts, four new school uniforms, three jumpers in white, black, and grey, a wizarding chess set carved from onyx, and a heavy tome on offensive spells with yellowed, heavy pages. Harry tries to apologize for not getting them anything, or to refuse the gifts as too generous, but Draco and his parents all give him more or less identical looks of amusement and dismiss his words as soon as they’re out of his mouth.

 

On Boxing Day, Harry and Draco play a distracted, drawn out game with Harry’s new chess set. The pieces are all shaped like dragons. Most of them end up with their wings broken off or their snouts gouged before they call it a draw and pack away the game on a shelf in the guest room Harry’s been sleeping in.

 

.x.

 

The day after Boxing Day, Harry convinces Mrs. and Mr. Malfoy to take them to Oxford Street to see the lights.

 

Draco complains for 10 uninterrupted minutes on the car ride there that he doesn’t see what’s so special about a bunch of stupid, yellow muggle bulbs. Then they’re on Oxford Street, and the sun sets, and the lights go on, and Draco is awestruck.

 

Harry doesn’t even tease him. He’s awestruck, himself.

 

High above their heads, strings of lights sketching out elegant contours shine and twinkle. And they are yellow, but they’re red and blue, too, white and green. The sky had turned orange, then grey, then black as the sun fell behind the buildings, but closer down under the web of lights, it’s nearly as bright as daytime.

 

The stores are all lit up as well. For as much as Draco likes to disparage anything muggle, he’s perfectly content to press his face up to the glass beside Harry’s as they peek in the shop windows. There are handheld video games, robots, stuffed animals and dolls of all sizes, and remote control planes, all lit up on fluffy white stuffing meant to resemble snow.

 

“That one belongs to an alien,” Harry says of one of the robot dogs, grasping at the disconnected narrative threads he’s glimpsed on the television around Dudley’s head through the garden window.

 

He could have said anything. Draco’s only barely paying him any attention.

 

.x.

 

Draco pulls abruptly from the window and shouts, “This way next, come on!”. He tugs Harry’s sleeve, trying to drag him against the tide of other children all lining up to see the things in the window.

 

“What’s over there?” Harry asks. Amusing as it’s been, Draco’s approach to this outing so far has been more mercurial than calculated, precisely.

 

Draco pulls harder, saying, “I don’t know, but the crowd is huge, so it must be good.”

 

Harry isn’t completely sold. But Draco is so excitable whereas Harry hardly knows what he’s looking at, so he lets himself be pulled. There’s resistance from the crowd at their backs for a moment, then suddenly Mrs. Malfoy is front of them and Mr. Malfoy’s behind them, and the way forward is clear.

 

They all bunch up together at the zebra crossing. Draco is still holding on to Harry’s arm. There’s a solid block of people every direction around them, but between Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy there’s a void of free space where the only person Harry’s in danger of bumping into is Draco. Harry can just see the cars streaming past around the elbows of the people directly in front of them.

 

Finally, the signal changes. Draco surges forward with the crowd, then around it, taking Harry with him. They make it to the other side of the street, and Draco veers off toward the throng of people he’d pointed out from their last stop. But Harry brings him up short.

 

“I don’t see your parents,” Harry tells Draco.

 

Draco says, “They’re right behind us.” But he turns and checks, and it’s immediately clear he doesn’t see them either.

 

.x.

 

Together, Harry and Draco work their way to the edge of the pavement. Back at the zebra crossing, Draco’s parents are still stuck on the other side.

 

“How’d they get over there?” Draco asks in a dissatisfied tone that means he doesn’t want any answers, he just wants to whinge.

 

“Come on.” Harry tugs this time. “We’ll wait for them there.” He tries leading Draco to a bench with an older woman sitting it.

 

As Harry pulls Draco over, the woman gets up and starts walking away. A few steps from the bench, Harry spots a handbag in the space where the woman was just sitting. “Wait!” Harry calls. He’s not loud enough to be heard over the crowd, though. The woman is drifting away quickly.

 

For a moment, Harry is undecided. He doesn’t know that woman, and he doesn’t have any obligation to help her. That sounds like Uncle Vernon in his head, though, or maybe Aunt Petunia. Something Dudley would parrot back, anyway.

 

Harry pulls away from Draco’s hold. He grabs the handbag from the bench and takes off after the woman. The crowd slows him down, every other person he runs into seemingly heading in the opposite direction. As much as Harry uses his size to his advantage, weaving through the spaces between other shoppers, he’s sure he’s going to lose her.

 

He turns a corner, and a second one, and then she’s right in front him, standing still, held up by someone’s haul from the Boxing Day sales dropped all over the pavement.

 

.x.

 

“Ma’am!” Harry shouts out, drawing up even with the old woman.

 

“Good evening,” she says, and turns towards him. She peers down at him through her glasses. Standing face to face like this, she looks like the sort of kindly grandmother parents instruct their children to find if they ever get separated in public. She looks like she has hard candies on her side table and a bad hip.

 

“Sorry,” Harry blurts out immediately. How must this look, some scrawny, uncoordinated kid chasing down a nice old grandmother? “I just...you.”

 

Harry tries to explain around his uneven, grasping breaths. He’d run pretty hard for how little ground they’d covered. Still winded, he gives up and just holds the handbag out toward her.

 

For several moments, the woman only stares at Harry. Harry feels self-conscious. He resists the urge to try to pat his hair down, turn his eyes aside. Then he remembers he’s dressed smartly in the new clothes the Malfoys gave him for Christmas, so small and awkward as he is, he has to at least look respectable.

 

“It’s yours,” Harry says with hesitation when she doesn’t reach out to take it back. “I didn’t, I didn’t take it.”

 

The woman’s eyes flick back up to his. She takes back her handbag with a frank, “Of course you didn’t, dear.”

 

“I _didn’t,_ ” Harry repeats for a third time, keenly aware that the repetition is doing more harm than good. “You left it at that bench back there.”

 

“Well,” the woman smiles. It makes Harry feel warm all over. “I guess today really is my lucky day. It’s been going very well, so far, though I was beginning to think my luck had finally run out when I realized I’d lost this.”

 

Harry stumbles through his reply of, “Glad I could help.”

 

The old woman straightens her glasses and bends down a bit so that’s she’s closer to Harry’s height. She meets Harry’s eyes, and this close she seems a lot less fragile. She sticks her empty right hand out and says, “I’m Minerva.”

 

“Hello, ma’am,” Harry says instead of his name. He shakes her hand, and as soon as he lets go, he says, “I mean--” and then he’s pushed sideways by Draco tackling him.

 

“There you are!” Draco shouts at him.

 

.x.

 

Draco has one arm around Harry, more a headlock than anything friendly. It’s like he’s considering dragging Harry off by the neck. “You know Mum and Dad get worried when they can’t see you,” Draco declares with an emphasis so over the top, it nearly succeeds in subtly just for how distractingly over the top it is.  


“I was giving Minerva back her handbag,” Harry explains. Draco follows his gesture over to Minerva. Minerva is staring at them with a critical eye, but the corners of her mouth are slightly lifted.

 

Draco does not introduce himself, because manners are wasted on muggles, or something. Harry elbows him just enough to get some breathing room and also for being a prat as usual. “Sorry. Again,” Harry says for the both of them.

 

Draco gives him a hard look.

 

“We should probably go back,” Harry concedes to Draco’s clear desire to exit this interaction. “Uh, nice meeting you?”

 

“That’s all right,” Minerva says, and turns to Draco. “I was just telling your cousin here about all the good luck I’ve had today. Like him returning my handbag after I left it on the bench.”

 

“Oh, he’s not--” Harry starts to correct her and then over the other voices in the crowd, Harry hears Mr. Malfoy call out a sharp, “Harry!”

 

Draco snatches Harry’s hand and jerks him away just as the crowd around them moves. Draco pulls so hard and suddenly, all Harry’s attention is forced to his feet and trying not to stumble. He doesn’t look back at Minerva at all.

 

.x.

 

One moment, Harry and Draco are alone in the crowd, and the next Mr. Malfoy is right in front of them. Draco backpedals into Harry, and they both nearly fall over.

 

Harry’s explanation about Minerva and the handbag dies in his throat at the look on Mr. Malfoy’s face.

 

Mr. Malfoy puts a hand on each of their shoulders, and the world twists without warning into a nauseating blur. Everything spins for a moment. Then, suddenly, they’re all in the Malfoys’ drawing room.

 

Draco gets released from his father’s crushing hold. He’s apparently just as dizzy as Harry feels, because Draco stumbles again, and this time he falls right to the floor. Harry casts a quick glance to make sure he’s all right, but he only gets to see the stunned expression on Draco’s face before Mr. Malfoy whirls him back around, both hands on Harry’s shoulders.

 

“Do you have any idea who that was?” Mr. Malfoy asks, eyes piercing. “What she could have done?”

 

Harry winces as Mr. Malfoy’s fingers dig in. It feels like Mr. Malfoy’s trying to grab his shoulder joints and pull them right out of his sockets.

 

“No,” Harry answers honestly. He doesn’t know who that woman was, though it’s clear now that he’s made a terrible mistake, and that little old lady wasn’t just some nice grandmother after all.

 

“You have exposed yourself,” Mr. Malfoy continues in a terse, quiet voice. “You have exposed us all. You--”

 

“Lucius,” Mrs. Malfoy says, magically appearing beside him with a sound like a tiny vacuum.

 

Mr. Malfoy’s hands drop from Harry’s shoulders like he’s been burned.

 

“Take Harry to your room,” Mrs. Malfoy instructs Draco.

 

.x.

 

“They’re not going to send you away,” Draco denies, side by side with Harry on his bedroom floor.

 

“Says you,” Harry says glumly.

 

“ _Yes_ , says me.” Draco rolls over onto his side and props himself up on one hand. “You’re in danger. And you’re my friend. So I won’t let them.”

 

Harry keep staring up at Draco’s bedroom ceiling. The hardwood under Harry’s hand has grown warm from his lying on it.

 

Draco’s parents are almost certainly still arguing, but they’re not the type to raise their voices, so it’s quiet in Draco’s room.

 

“You’re not going anywhere,” Draco promises.

 

“OK,” Harry says.

 

.x.

 

Draco’s wrong.

 

.x.

 

Mrs. and Mr. Malfoy do send Harry away, but they send Draco, too.

 

“It would be in your best interest to be in a less densely populated area,” Mrs. Malfoy tells them the day after the disastrous trip to Oxford Street. There had been a quietly tense meal the night before, with Mr. Malfoy insistent that they all sit together at the table like usual, but equally determined to neither look nor speak to either of the boys. “You’ll be able to focus more fully on your magical development, without the distraction of so many muggles.”

 

Without the possibility of accidentally running into any other witches or wizards, she does not say, but Harry hears all the same.

 

“I’m not telling you this to frighten you,” she also tells them, right after, “You should have died, Harry.” That’s the middle part, Mrs. Malfoy explaining again the unsuccessful attempt on his life. “You were a defenseless baby, and the man who attacked you was one of the most powerful wizards of all time. There is no reason you should have survived.”

 

Harry knows that already. He is --dealing with it. Learning to live with the idea that every day he isn’t dead is like twisting a wind-up key on a spring that’s already under as much pressure as it can take. But it’s one thing for Draco to tell Harry there are people out there who want him dead. Draco also tells him nice things are only nice because other people can’t afford them.

 

Mrs. Malfoy tells him to always wipe his shoes when he comes indoors, to sip his tea so it doesn’t burn his tongue. Simple, practical, sensible things. Mrs. Malfoy tells them, “We haven’t discussed this frankly with you because these are adult concerns. They’re wholly inappropriate for children to worry about. But the reality is that there are people who would take any opportunity to end your life.

 

“I’m not telling you this to frighten you,” she concludes, correctly reading the terror beginning to expand under his chest, working open the space between his ribs. “I’m telling you this so you’ll understand.”

 

(Harry doesn’t.)

 

.x.

 

There are five days between Boxing Day and the New Year, and five more days between the New Year and when Stonewall resumes classes.

 

The Dursleys return home right after the New Year, so Harry goes back to their house, which just means Harry sleeps in the bed in Dudley’s old toy room and makes breakfast each morning for his cousin, his uncle, and his aunt, and then Draco and one or the other of his parents come and fetch him right from practically the front door stoop.

 

Draco reports that his parents have had several tense calls with his Uncle Severus, (although Harry has never seen a phone at the Malfoys’...) and one day soon thereafter, they leave Harry and Draco alone in the house for several hours.

 

“We’ve charmed the doors and windows,” Mrs. Malfoy tells them in Mr. Malfoy’s office, where she and Mr. Malfoy are both dressed obviously for an excursion, and both have their wands in their hands, “so if anyone crosses them, we’ll know immediately. Stay indoors.”

 

Then they both disappear in the sudden twist Harry has since learned is called apparition, and it’s just Harry and Draco.

 

Harry and Draco play most of a round of chess with Harry’s set, read the play-by-play of the 1982 Quidditch World Cup final in Mr. Malfoy’s study, and then play hide-and-seek until Harry, who hides in relatively plain sight in the kitchen for nearly a half-hour, realizes Draco’s still in his dad’s study. He’s dug up the 1978 Quidditch Cup final play-by-play, so they read that one, too.

 

When Draco’s parents return, Harry and Draco are both eating sandwiches under the dining room table, a long course of lobbed oranges improvising quaffles and bludgers, and all the things they’d knocked over radiating outward through the ground floor.

 

.x.

 

Draco’s parents relocate the two of them to a boarding school in a tiny town on the east coast called Springcreek.

 

Springcreek is a democratic school, which means every student and every teacher gets the exact same say on almost everything, from coursework to when and what to have for dinner.

 

For Harry, who has never before met an adult who cared to hear his opinion one way or the other, this is extraordinary.

 

For Draco, it means an end to pretending to be the slightest bit concerned about muggle _anything_.

 

At Springcreek, Harry and Draco share a cottage with seven other boys, the youngest of which just turned nine over the winter holiday and the oldest of which is due to turn 12 just in time for the summer.

 

It’s nothing like Hogwarts. The room Harry and Draco are led to when they arrive has 4 metal dorm beds with all manners of colorful quilts and wooly blankets worn satin smooth under nervous hands. Nothing matches anything else.

 

The bottom beds have already been claimed by the youngest student, Milton, and Rashid, whose bed is made up with neat hospital corners and has what seems to be his entire wardrobe piled up underneath it all the time. The beds are pressed together in a corner at right angles, so at night, Harry and Draco lay their heads in the same direction, and in the dark Draco’s hair reflects back the moonlight from the window.

 

Draco hates the bed. It’s smaller than the one he has at home, although it’s still soft. He falls asleep abruptly right in the middle of his whispering complaints. Harry lies awake long afterward, alone in the silence.

 

.x.

 

Springcreek has a timetable and classes, but not the way the same way as Stonewall.

 

Their house parent, a middle-aged man named Jane, strongly suggests both a bed-time and a time to be up and engaged with the day each morning, but he doesn’t put any effort behind it. There are elected student officials for that. Mostly, they’re above pouring water over another student’s head, but not all the time.

 

Speaking of the other students, they all have names like Thistle and Charity and Harmonia, but also Sarah and Rupert and Anum. There are four other buildings where people sleep, split amongst the youngest boarders, the teachers who live in the ivy and brick block across from the kitchen, and the older boys’ and girls’ houses. The students mostly all make it from their corners of campus into the main building by the time their teachers do, because otherwise they miss breakfast. But during class hours, they carve wood with pocket knives or put on loud stagings of acts from plays that they abandon halfway through, and the adults just keep smiling while they sharpen their blades.

 

The classes are split between the day students who are short with dirty knees and faces, the teenagers whose bodies haven’t sorted out if they’re all adult now or not, and then everyone else. The curriculum in Harry and Draco’s class is determined by group consensus each Friday after tea. Draco’s sole contribution to the endeavor is getting Latin added, which he does on their fourth day there with a smugly pointed look at Harry while the teacher tallies the other kids’ majority approval. The lessons endure for weeks after, even when Draco stops showing up in the building other than to demonstrate that yes, he’s still alive.

 

.x.

 

There’s a telephone in the main building for students to call their families. Not even an outrageously ancient one, just a depressingly beige plastic heap that goes on a table in a wardrobe sized room on the ground floor. It’s not very private--there’s a door to close, but the door is old. There’s a big gap on the top and bottom where the more impassioned conversations all leak through. The cloudy privacy window turns any movement inside into a shadow puppet show.

 

Mostly no one uses the telephone. Three of the older kids have mobiles, but even without that, Harry only ever sees a Barely Boarding Age Child in the throes of the epidemic homesickness that periodically spreads through the little ones actually using it.

 

Draco’s parents do not have a telephone. They have one half of a set of mirrors, and Draco and Harry have the other, packed in black velvet at the bottom of one of the two black and gold trunks Draco’s parents sent along with them.

 

“These are Black family heirlooms,” Mrs. Malfoy had said at their only lesson held in between Boxing Day and the day they’d come to Springcreek. Mr. Malfoy had taken Draco upstairs with one of the mirrors while Harry stayed downstairs with Mrs. Malfoy, and they’d practiced talking to each other through them.

 

Harry had assumed the ease with which he and Draco transition, unremarked, into Springcreek’s habitat was down to Draco’s parents quietly dispatching any tricky questions or curiosities. The longer he’s here, though, the more he realizes how much of it is down to Springcreek being Springcreek.

 

.x.

 

It’s liberating. Harry can go to class when he the lessons are interesting and sit in the corner reading about Quidditch when they’re not. He can even just leave, sit in an empty classroom with Draco over the red leather book whose text shimmers and shifts when they ask it questions if he wants, and no one cares to stop them.

 

It’s restricting, too, without Draco’s mom or dad there with them, isolating the words that matter, pointing out the magic.

 

And there’s a limit, still, to how much out of the ordinary can be forgiven, even at a place like Springcreek. Even Melissa, one of the youngest of the upper crowd, who says she can talk to animals and wanders barefoot across the grounds on nights when the moon is new, would have questions if she caught two lower form boys reassuring a mirror with the wrong sort of reflection entirely that yes, they have reviewed the six uncommon uses of baby’s breath this week, and no, no one’s tried to poison their soup.

 

So Harry and Draco spend a lot of time looking for overlooked places to use the mirrors. Hiding, still, down unused corridors and in forgotten corners.

 

.x.

 

By February, the little snow that had dusted the grounds at the school is barely sticking around, but it’s still chillier than the vast potential of the main building’s underused rooms, so most of the students stay indoors.

 

Harry and Draco, bundled in matching grey overcoats, figure the privacy outweighs the temperature, and go outdoors. (Inside, no matter how disused the room, they often got walked in on, by other students, by teachers, by randy teenagers.)

 

In addition to the mirror, Draco’s parents had packed their trunks with several more changes of clothes than Harry had originally owned, small vials of perfectly innocent looking liquids with tiny, precise instructions wrapped around, and several books about potion theory and spell categories and nothing at all that required an actual wand to practice.

 

Harry and Draco pass most of their time studying the books and the vials and the plants that grow up, unattended, in the fields around the school. And that’s fine, for a little while, but it’s not the same as _doing_ magic.

 

x.

 

They don’t have wands, so it doesn’t matter either way, but Harry still feels compelled to ask, “Who cares if kids are doing a bit of magic? And-- _and._ Shouldn’t they want us to practice? Because it seems to me that you should practice that sort of thing, doesn’t it? Like summer homework.”

 

“Harry,” Draco sighs, “there are secrecy statues. All it takes is one stupid, hormonal teenager being seen by a single muggle, and suddenly we’re all being hunted by mobs with pitchforks and torches.”

 

“I ...hadn’t really thought of it like that,” Harry admits, uneasy with the image of Uncle Vernon’s colleagues on the Malfoys’ front lawn in the middle of the night, torch light shining up against the windows and pitchforks in their hands, before he realizes Draco meant the kind with _fire_. “How do they know?”

 

“What, muggles?”

 

“No,” Harry shakes his head. “How does anyone even know if a kid is using magic? I mean, would your parents report you somewhere?”

 

Draco scowls, “Don’t be absurd. It’s a charm, obviously.”

 

“How does it work?” Harry presses the opening. “Do your parents put it on when you’re born--”

 

“ _No._ It wouldn’t last that long, so of course--”

 

“Or when you start school?”

 

“I don’t know,” Draco snaps, and there is no longer a playful edge to his anger.

 

Harry stops asking.

 

Draco, though, keeps answering. “It can’t be parents. Because then only the kids who weren’t mudbloods would be affected, wouldn’t they? That’s completely backwards. So it’s probably the school.”

 

For a few moments, the conversation stalls there, spinning without traction on one of those fixed points in magical theory of which Harry was still mostly unaware and Draco navigated by. It happens, sometimes. Then Draco’s expression opens back up to Harry’s prying.

 

.x.

 

“If you never go to the school,” Harry says, teasing out the part of Draco’s argument that proves he’s on to something, “you’d never have the charm put on, right?”

 

Draco’s sharp indignity shifts to a lesser part embarrassment at having been caught in his own logic and a greater part annoyance that Harry had caught him. “I guess...” he concedes.

 

“So we don’t have the charm, right?”

 

“Maybe,” Draco says after a lengthy pause. “But maybe not. And if we’re caught--”

 

“Who’s going to catch us?” Harry steamrolls over the objection. “Hogwarts? You said it yourself, that place has been empty for years.”

 

“Not Hogwarts, the Ministry,” Draco mutters.

 

“You said they’re gone, too.”

 

Draco doesn’t mutter this time. In fact, his words get louder and louder, until he’s nearly yelling by the end of his rebuttal. “I _said_ only people with unsavory ties stuck around after you almost killed the Dark Lord. There could be all kinds of people with _really unsavory_ friends sitting around waiting for some idiot to lead them right to their door. Do you _want that_?”

 

“ _No,_ ” Harry says in frustration. “Of course I don’t want that.” He tries awkwardly to find a way back to victory, and finally settles bluntly on, “Your parents thought it was safe.”

 

“My parents,” Draco counters impatiently, but nonetheless backing down from his outburst, “aren’t here. Anyway, the law’s a reasonable restriction. It doesn’t count if our lives’re in danger. Which they _are._ ”

 

Draco crosses his arms, and then with slight delay uncrosses them again. “It’s murderous wizards on one side and homicidal muggles on the other,” he concludes with great satisfaction as his own dramatic presentation of their plight, making Harry’s point for him several silent moments before he’s realized that’s what he’s done.

 

Harry, sportingly, doesn’t say anything in triumph.

 

Draco still scowls.

 

.x.

 

Draco’s concession aside, not having a wand to practice magic with is an obstacle. It’s an insurmountable obstacle.

 

Until it’s not.

 

.x.

 

Draco still doesn’t go to class, even for Latin lessons. He does bring a paperback Latin-English dictionary with cracks already forming in its spine and a heavy dark green tome from their trunks down to the creek on the far south of the school’s land. The cover of the green tome has embossed letters, but it had been worn almost smooth around them, so all Harry can really make out is _Spells_ and _Grade._

 

“Bloody declensions,” Draco grumbles, lying on his back in the dry brown grass. They’ve spent hours at this point by the banks of the creek.

 

Harry grabs the dictionary, and the dictionary’s bent corners bend further under his fingers. He flips to the A-section. “’Accio'--is that an X and an S, or a K?”

 

Draco rolls his eyes. “It’s two Cs.”

 

Harry tosses the dictionary back down.

 

“You do this on purpose,” Harry says accusingly, half under his breath.

 

“I’ve done literally all I can do for you,” Draco replies without apology.

 

.x.

 

“Accio,” Harry says, hissing the letters between his teeth, “accio, accio.” He stretches his hand out toward a pile of pebbles on the creek bed, tries to envision it working the way it does for Draco’s parents.

 

“Agricola,” Draco says in turn, annoyed, “agricolae, agricolae, agricolam--but that’s a noun, hang on.” And he rolls his eyes up toward the top of his head, makes a brief show of intense concentration. “Amare, amo, amas, amat, et cetera.”

 

Harry repeats skeptically, “Just Latin?”

 

“Laudo,” Draco nods, closing his eyes. “Sum. Absumus.”

 

Harry exhales loudly. “Accio,” he enunciates, and nothing happens. Of course. None of the little pebbles on the ground so much as wobbles. “This is pointless. It doesn’t even make sense.”

 

“It literally means, ‘I summon,” Draco mocks, “so this sounds like a you problem.”

 

“Why not just say ‘I summon’?” Harry complains.

 

“Because that’s not the way it w--” Draco starts to say, opening his eyes, then stops as he comes face to face with a little toad.

 

It must be one of the first toads of the season, it’s so small.

 

The toad floats in front of Draco’s face with its legs sweeping slowly outward, as if it had been submerged in honey. Draco just stares straight into its bulging eyes.

 

There’s a beat, and then the toad falls to his chest.

 

“Sorry,” Harry says, equally stunned, “I blinked.”

 

.x.

 

Draco is ecstatic about Harry’s wandless magic, which improves at a much faster rate than Draco’s own, at which point he huffs that wild magic is nothing to write home about.

 

So they don’t. Write home about it.

 

They do keep practicing.

 

.x.

 

One day in the middle of March, they get company at the creek.

 

Draco wants to leave immediately, even though the other boys are too far upstream to possibly see or hear anything they’re doing. They’re nearly too far away to distinguish between at all, except for Stuart, who is tall and has bright red hair and is easier to notice than not in a crowd.

 

Stuart’s always easy to find in a crowd because besides his hair and his height, Stuart wears more jewelry than anyone else Harry’s ever met. But it’s not jewelry like his Aunt Petunia’s. It’s all strappy black and red bracelets, chain necklaces, silver and black rings with little squares of metal embedded on the sides. Draco dislikes him because he’s by far the teenager they’ve walked in on in a dark corner with some girl or another the most while looking for somewhere to call Draco’s parents. Harry thinks he’s pretty cool, though.

 

“We should go,” Draco decides, eyes cut in disapproval up to where the older boys are climbing down into the valley.

 

“It’s fine, we’re hardly even doing anything,” Harry says in response. They aren’t. There are pebbles pulled from the creek bed lying between them, slowly strobing through muted colors.

 

“We can’t practice any magic with that lot around,” Draco complains. “Even if they weren’t tragically muggle, I couldn’t concentrate with all their uncivilized yapping. They’re like a pack of wild dogs.”

 

“They’ll probably leave soon,” Harry says. Even as the words leave his mouth, Stuart and his friends are pulling off their clothes and splashing, shrieking, into the icy water. It’s admittedly pretty distracting.

 

.x.

 

“They’re going to catch pneumonia, or drown, or get bitten by something venomous and get necrosis and then all their stupid skin will fall off,” Draco lists off with grim pleasure in his own macabre predictions. “Because they’re stupid _muggles._ You just watch, they’re too useless to keep themselves alive. Are you listening to me?”

 

“Yes,” Harry replies, but he’s not.

 

“You’re not listening to me,” Draco says. The tone of his voice makes it clear that Harry’s lapse in attention is the biggest affront he’s been forced to endure today. “You’re not even looking at me.”

 

Harry twists back around toward Draco’s frowning face. “There.”

 

Draco does this thing sometimes where his eyelids twitch, like he started to roll his eyes and then forcibly held himself back. He does it now. And then he asks, “What, are you queer?”

 

.x.

 

Here are a few ways Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia have told Harry he is different:

 

Sometimes the pain in Harry’s empty stomach, or his bruised arms, or his chest, would get to be too much, and he couldn’t push past it anymore. _What are you,_ his uncle would say when Harry couldn’t stop the tears, _a nancy boy?_  
  
_Poof,_ Dudley would call him after pushing Harry to the ground.  
  
And Aunt Petunia would complain about how much work it took to feed him (scraps), clothe him (in Dudley’s old castoffs), house him (beneath the stairs), and after all that, Harry still just wouldn’t fit in. He just wasn’t normal.

 

Until Draco told Harry they were wrong. Harry _was_ like other boys. Harry, in fact, was like Draco.

 

So now it’s too late. Harry has already learned the rules for Quidditch and all the most important magic, the ones for locks and lights and blisters _._ Maybe he should lie and say he’ll get stronger one day, that he’ll stop crying about things, that he’ll never need anyone’s help again because boys who might as well be girls, who were soft and liked other boys, they were supposed to be ashamed, but Harry’s _not._

 

 

.x.

 

Draco, oblivious to Harry’s thoughts, grinding slowly like tectonic plates finally coming unstuck, does not give Harry a chance to respond. “I’m not going to be caught by a _muggle_ just because you think one of them is cute.”

 

Harry’s chest puffs up as he prepares his defense, but Draco’s on a roll. “You’re looking at the mangy redhead, aren’t you?” Draco accuses Harry, and then shudders and gags dramatically. “There’s nothing less attractive than a redhead. You have awful taste in boys.”

 

Some of the air goes out of Harry. “Wait. So you’re--”

 

“ _Deeply ashamed_ of you, yes,” Draco interrupts haughtily. “For not picking literally any other muggle boy to be smitten with.”

 

“You think I have awful taste in boys,” Harry repeats in abject disbelief. “You--”

 

“You _do_ ,” Draco says with finality.

 

.x.

 

Time at Springcreek passes not like in a dream, fleeting and half-remembered even as it’s happening, but like something unchained, drifting away with deceptive speed. Like the higher up you hold an object, the bigger the impact it makes when it hits the ground.

 

It’s the magic. Harry and Draco spend hours down by the creek, in the valley with the dead wildflowers, finding magic while their books slowly gather dust back in their shared room.

 

And it’s Draco realizing with sudden crystal insight that maybe this whole protective relocation was really always meant to be a punishment. A fucking-- time-out.

 

It’s the week before Easter, when Jane comes around the cottage asking, what do you plan to do?

 

.x.

 

“We should do it,” Draco says from his bed as though they’d been having a conversation.

 

Harry, half asleep and sinking just a little into the space between the mattress and the wall, manages a very confused, “Do what?”

 

The shadow from the next bed over shifts and grows, until Harry reckons with any sort of light in the room, he’d be looking at Draco sitting up and leaning over the railing the way that gives little Milton a heart attack. “I’ll tell my father we’re staying here for the holiday. We can take the train to London with the others.”

 

“Do _what?_ ” Harry says again, unable to summon the energy for new words.

 

And Draco, who has a strong sense of self-preservation, but a strong sense, too, of injustice, of loss, says, “We should go to Hogwarts.”

 

 _Yes,_ Harry’s brain says enthusiastically right before everything is snuffed back out by unconsciousness, so he has to say it again in the morning, when Draco is considerably less charitable about being left hanging on such a dramatic pronouncement.

 

.x.

 

In one of the empty rooms in the main building that usually gets raided for dramatic readings and reenactments, Harry and Draco find several mismatched suitcases and knapsacks. They select a couple of bags without holes and take them back to their room and pack them with things from their trunks, the whole time concentrating on how everything they want to take has to fit and not on how it shouldn’t.

 

The day after the last day of classes, Jane, in a housecoat and with his morning tea in a huge mug, stands by the front door of the cottage and dutifully fills out and signs off on the form he was supposed to fill out the night before for all the kids who are leaving for the holiday.

 

“Going to meet your folks in London?” Jane, bleary eyed, checks when it’s their turn in the queue.

 

“Yes,” Harry replies while Draco, whose for-real parents are supposed to meet the two of them in this elaborate fiction they’ve spun in the past week, just stares. “They’ll meet us at King’s Cross.”

 

Jane checks their names off his list and waves them through the door into the twilight.

 

There’s a driveway that winds up to the main building, curves in front of it, and then sweeps back down the hill to rejoin the road into town. It’s the only paved path on the grounds, and this morning, there are two orange and green buses parked back to back right where the road turns away from the school.

 

Harry and Draco climb into a seat near the back of the first bus, which isn’t full, but is certainly rowdy enough. There hadn’t been time for breakfast before the buses left, so one of the teachers chaperoning the trip passes out pastries and warm chocolate milk as they roll down the lane into town.

 

At the train station, Harry and Draco realize that for all their careful planning, they’ve made a critical miscalculation: they don’t actually have tickets for the train.

 

“Well, we can’t just go back,” Harry argues reasonably. Having entered with the wave of other Springcreek students, they’re huddling inconspicuously in the main hall of the train station, which is hazy dark blue from the sunrise coming through the skylights.

 

There are a couple of counters with station workers behind them and a board of the departing trains and the prices for tickets on the wall between them.

 

“I _don’t have muggle money,_ ” Draco hisses. The only spot of color in his face is the pink gum lining his grimace. “Do you?”

 

Harry shoves Draco’s shoulder in answer. Draco rolls his eyes, but all the breath becomes unstuck in his throat in one great rush, and Draco starts breathing normally again.

 

x.

 

“OK,” Harry says, glancing at the big clock over the line of doors back out to the street. There’s 39 minutes until the first train for London leaves. “Maybe....they won’t check?”

 

Draco’s hunching demeanor unshrinks until there’s snobby judgment written through every line of Draco’s body again. More like normal, even if his pants recently usually have dirt stains across the back pockets. “This kind of inefficiency,” he says, “is deeply troubling.”

 

“Just--come on,” Harry sighs. He pulls Draco from the flow of traffic through the building with his hand on what had seemed to be an unnecessary strap on his knapsack.

  
At least, he does until Draco complains, “I’m not a dog, that’s _choking,”_ and makes Harry take his hand instead.

 

They sneak past the fare collectors onto the platform through a combination of distraction and Notice-Me-Not. Neither boy is particularly adept at that, though, to Mr. Malfoy’s continued chagrin last time they’d gone over it with him, so it’s a good thing all the newspapers on the stand nearby suddenly go crashing to the ground, and a few of the passengers who aren’t as awake as they would be in another hour slip and fall or grab hold of other things that go crashing to the ground as well. It’s loud, and noisy, and by the time they’ve straightened everything back out, the train to London is pulling up to the platform.

 

.x.

 

In London, there’s some extended confusion when it turns out they’re _not_ at King’s Cross. Luckily, Harry spots an older Springcreek kid loudly giving her farewells to her friends as they take the stairs up to street level. She’s complaining about having to travel King’s Cross all by herself because her parents wanted to leave directly for their extended holiday to the country, which is to say, she’s complaining in that way Draco does when he intends to brag and have everyone hear about it.

 

Harry and Draco share a look, and then sprint after her.

 

Several commuters between the train station and King’s Cross unexpectedly lose either their drinks or their morning news, but Harry and Draco make it to the platform concourse without any awkward questions about where their guardian is or having to figure out how much muggle money they should have had for this adventure.

 

“This is stupid,” Harry says to the brick wall between platform 9 and platform 10. “This is a stupid idea. This was a _stupid plan._ ”

 

“You said yourself the Express’s our best chance,” Draco argues, bringing Past Harry into the conversation against Present Harry, which seems unfair. “Bet you anything it’ll be here to drop off students for the winter hols, and after that, it’s back to Hogsmeade.”

 

“But what if it doesn’t go back to Hogsmeade? What if it just sits here waiting?” Harry demands, becoming aware of the weight of his bag across his shoulders, pressing down and digging in. Only as soon as he becomes aware of it, it fades and then disappears. Harry twists around to check that he hasn’t lost the knapsack, but it looks exactly the way it had before it essentially became weightless.

 

When he turns back around, Draco’s arm is halfway through the solid brick wall. “Harry,” Draco says quietly, face stretched in a delighted grin, “Harry, your bag is floating.”

 

Harry wraps his fingers tight around the straps of his bag while Draco disappears into the wall with a laugh.

 

.x.

  
Behind him, around him, the morning crowd in King’s Cross keeps going on about their lives. The sun is up, and the sky is clear, so inside the station, there is full daylight as office workers _tap tap tap_ across the platforms in their business shoes.The train horns and station announcements ebb and crest as trains arrive or depart, and from the direction of the shops, the sweet smell of doughnuts and fresh bread drifts by. Everyone disregards the sight of a boy doing what is either the bravest or dumbest thing he’s ever done.

 

And they disregard it when, a few moments later, Harry does the same.

 

Platform 9 3/4 is silent. It’s not just the contrast to the full swing of commuters during the morning rush they left behind. It’s like nothing living had been on the platform for years.

 

There’s light, from the lanterns stretching down the tracks and the skylights overhead, but it only punctures the darkness in tiny halos that dim and dim and then fade.

 

Harry hears Draco’s running footsteps coming back toward him before Draco himself is in sight again. For all the gloom, his expression is lit up more than any other time Harry’s been with him.

 

They don’t say anything. They wait together, standing in the circle of light of one of the lanterns beside the tracks.

 

There are people in the world who want him dead, Harry knows, but here on the platform it’s just him and Draco.

 

.x.

 

“Do you really think the train will come?”

 

It’s a good question. If there were no students at the school, there wasn’t any reason for the train to come to London. If it were broken and hadn’t ever repaired, or Hogwarts didn’t even have the same holiday as their tiny muggle free school. If--

 

“Yes,” Draco says. It’s the answer he prefers.

 

.x.

 

None of the clocks on the platform show the same time, but they all agree it’s been hours since Harry and Draco arrived.

 

The two of them have long since given up on standing around. They’d sat on the benches at first, which were covered in dust and made them both sneeze. They’d stretched out on their backs along the stones, the tops of their heads a few centimeters apart. There’s not enough light on the platform for them to see across to the other side, so they’d gone to the edge of the platform, dangling their feet and heads and hands over the tracks, discussed jumping down and going across or following the rails up to see what there was to see, but in the end, neither of them had dared to.

 

Now, they’re huddled up against the arch back out to the muggle platforms with their knees drawn up and their bags scrunched between their backs and the jagged bricks. Neither of them has dared to bring up the idea of trying to go back, either.

 

“The first thing I’ll do,” Draco says, voice slowing with growing exhaustion, “the first thing. I’m going to fly on the Quidditch pitch.”

 

“That’s the seventh first thing you said you’ll do,” Harry notes. Also on Draco’s list are finding the Slytherin house rooms, eating in the Great Hall, speaking to a real live ghost, and finding one of the secret passages into the kitchen. “The one before this was climbing the Astronomy Tower.”

 

“Obviously that one has to wait until it’s dark,” Draco snaps defensively. “ _Fine._ Your turn.”

 

Harry picks idly at the hem of his shirt sleeve, which isn’t stretched out and doesn’t have any holes, and so doesn’t provide the same level of engagement he’d been hoping for. He’s at the stage of hunger where his stomach still hurts, but he knows if he just goes to sleep for a while, he’ll wake up and then it won’t. Only Draco keeps talking about what they’ll do when (if) the train finally comes and they make it to Hogwarts, and the anxiety from this morning about not getting caught out is slow to fade.

 

Draco yawns, and his head dips. “ _Harry._ ”

 

“The Great Hall,” Harry recites his previous answers. “And then the --the library.” Draco snickers, and Harry grinds the heel of his shoe into Draco’s foot before continuing. “And the lake.”

 

After several quiet, measured breaths that mean Draco’s closer to the sleep than he’d like Harry to know, he prods, “That’s it?”

 

“And the ...pitch,” Harry says around his own yawn. “The Quidditch pitch.”

 

He doesn’t remember anything after that.

 

.x.

 

“Harry,” a disembodied voice speaks directly to Harry’s subconscious, “Harry, I see a light.”

 

“Don’t go towards it,” Harry warns, which seems the practical thing to say.

 

Draco shakes Harry’s shoulder more vigorously until Harry wakes up and remembers where he is. It’s very dark on the platform. Or it should be.

 

Like that first day at school, light frames Draco’s whole body in stark contrasts where he’s kneeling over Harry. Draco says, “I think it’s the train.”

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
